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Get in touchIt is becoming increasingly difficult to effectively reach our audience to deliver our event content. This is in part due to increased smartphone addiction which leads to a decreasing attention span, an increasing amount of distractions, and an expectation for information to reach us in small, digestible pieces. So how can we overcome these obstacles to deliver content that will be absorbed? If you can’t beat them, join them — or in other words, leverage smartphone addiction to create a better event experience! But how do we know what the participants think of our event? How do we get them to engage and have fun? And what does event engagement even mean?
You often hear about event engagement in event circles as something that is highly sought after at meetings and conferences. But what does engagement really mean and how do we know if we have attained it?
One definition we like here at MeetApp is, “the degree to which attendees are fully participating in and captivated by your event.” Note that, although we love to talk about how you can use an app to achieve high event engagement, technology is not mentioned in this definition.
Event engagement is a metric. On one side of the scale, we have a completely passive person who hears what is being said but is not taking part in the discussion in any way. On the other side, we have an active participant who is fully focused on and captivated by the discussion. This person is asking questions, taking notes, laughing at jokes, or applauding a good point. In other words, they are an engaged attendee.
“An engaged attendee is a happy attendee” – Sal Camarda, CEO at MeetApp North America
Still pretty abstract, right? This is where technology comes in. You can use an event app as a tool to both contribute to increased attendee engagement and to make it easier to measure that engagement.
As an event professional, you aspire to create fun, motivational, and inspiring event experiences – but how can you do so and how can you leverage technology to do it?
Start by defining your goals. Create goals that will drive your participants to interact with the content and with each other. In addition, make sure your goals are measurable. For example:
You also want to increase app adoption. Your other goals are largely dependent on the participants using the features of the event app, so you want to be sure that the app is used. You can encourage this by:
These are some examples from our latest webinar “The ABC’s of Event Engagement” about how you can create and measure event engagement at your next meeting or event.