As event planners and producers, you have a growing selection of digital tools to help lighten the physical and mental load of executing an event. Message boards, printed registration booklets and physical attendance are no longer requirements as digital alternatives – primarily event apps and live-streaming — become the standard. Leveraging your digital event tools beyond providing basic event information can enhance attendee experience through more targeted engagement, responsiveness, networking and community-building.
The Survey Says…
Every event planner appreciates the transition from printed registration booklets to the event apps, utilizing them to provide agendas, session descriptions, speaker bios, maps and other administrative tasks. This frees you up to engage with event partners to suggest and facilitate other uses for the apps such as polling and survey functions to engage the audience on content specifics, customized live-stream landing pages to help remote viewers feel less removed from the messaging, or real-time twitter streams on screens in the room. Attendees will appreciate the opportunity to participate and be heard.
Bartha can partner with you to help craft messaging and provide graphic, animation, video and other production support for maximum impact as well as orchestrate and present audience surveys in a manner that engages attendees in fun and meaningful ways.
Gamification = Networking
We know that you are always looking for ways to facilitate networking among your attendees. The good news is that through simple gamification techniques, an event app can be used to facilitate networking in ways that are effective and increase the fun factor.
One popular app-based activity is a “scavenger hunt” in which attendees seek information from other attendees or entities to successfully complete the hunt. Compile a list of a dozen or so activities to complete, or factoids to seek and find from other attendees or organization representatives. Activities can be as simple as, “Exchange business cards with an attendee from a state other than your own,” or “Go to booth #12 in the expo and get a sticker.” Most of the activities included should have a business purpose specific to the event.
We can help your team design and customize the scavenger hunt activities to encourage attendees to explore the event and gather contacts and info in ways that support the overall objectives of the event. Strategic gamification is a tool that can help ensure attendees get what you intended from the event while keeping it fun and engaging.
Build Future Attendance Through Post-Event Activities
Event follow-up is often over-looked as one of the most effective steps toward promoting the next event. Post-event surveys on your event app can help you determine the effectiveness of the just-concluded event, what worked well, what could work better, what will be carried over to future events and more.
Include photos, videos from the recent event, along with attendee quotes and comments supporting the reasons to attend future events. Because the app will typically only be active for a short period following the event, attempt to migrate attendees from the app to a social media page specific to that event. This can continue to be a hub for information for recent and future events.
What are you waiting for?
With all the options at your fingertips, you can trust us to help you determine which tools to use to help achieve your objectives and outcomes for a variety of audiences. Find out more about our capabilities here then contact us here to get started.
One comment
Reno Macri
November 30, 2017 at 9:01 am
Technology, in the form of mobile and digital tech, is currently the main disruptor for many sectors and events are no exception. From an event “front end perspective”, various new tools, apps and platforms can help you catch attendees’ attention. However, looking at strategy and planning, which takes place behind the scene, it seems that data is the most promising tool of all.
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