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Every event organiser wants their attendees to be happy. Regardless of how long they’re inside the venue, how many sessions they attend or the people they meet, they want them to enjoy every bit of the experience. An easy route towards that goal is to get them engaged.
The next natural question is, “how do I get my audience more engaged”? An organiser can do all they can with the schedule, the venue and even the catering; it can still amount to a flat, uninspiring occasion.
Audience engagement is a strange beast and one that must be addressed with purposeful actions. In short, if you want to drive engagement for your event and its content, you’ll have to make a conscious effort to do so.
A cost-effective method of creating a more engaging experience is to harness the power of your official event app – your digital gateway for audience interaction.
A tailored experience
Apps make for a convenient way of supplying information to attendees. They also drive engagement through small, relatively basic features, like the ‘agenda builder’ for enabling attendees to customise their schedule.
If you can get someone to construct something around their preferences, you stand a better chance of getting them engaged. People enjoy the option of customising their experience and it’s why your event app should have features that allow for the bookmarking of sessions and other content.
In-app chat
In an event which promises networking as a feature, you can grease the wheel through the use of a chat function within your event app. This makes it easier for attendees to strike up conversations and meet with one another – a simple recipe for engagement.
We’ve seen how social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have grown in popularity by encouraging people to communicate and share their opinions. Through your official event app, you have the tools to build a small but engaged network of your own making.
Social links
Attendees love to post about events on their social networks. Still, as you’re looking to avoid them navigating from your app, the technology should support a connection to the likes of Twitter and Facebook to allow for the sharing of opinions from its own dashboard.
When someone logs into the app, they can see the social conversation from other attendees and join in where they see fit. It’s a tactic that creates an easy way of building debates around key talking points while putting that content in a visible place.
Gamification
Many events are now using the concept of gamification to drive engagement with their attendees and yours should be no different. One of the more common methods sees the offering of points for every visit of a session, answer to a poll and journey to key areas around the venue, all powered by digital check-in,
You can afford to be creative with how you “gamify” your audience, but do try and think of activities that can broaden someone’s awareness of your event and its content. That way, you are giving them a reason to enjoy the event itself, rather than just the game.
If you liked this article, you can read more about “Entertaining event engagement ideas to grab your audience’s attention”.