Attendee engagement – it’s a great buzzword, but what does it really mean? Authentic attendee engagement includes emotional engagement, cognitive engagement, and behavioral engagement. Whew that’s a mouthful!
The scarier part? The only way you can ensure all three is through intentional planning, implementation, and execution of specific strategies.
So today, let’s take a look at the three factors that can affect attendee engagement, according to education researchers and authors Robert J. Marzano and Debra J. Pickering: emotional connection, perceived interest and importance in the topic.
1. Attendees’ level of activity and emotional connection
If your guests are sitting passively listening, their energy and engagement decreases. Activities such as Q & A where you throw around a mic box, starting off sessions with a few minutes of stretching, encouraging seatmates to introduce themselves to their neighbors, and having everyone play rock, paper, scissors in pairs until there’s one champion in the room, are all creative ways to get guests thinking and engaged at any point during your conference.
If your guests are sitting passively listening, their energy and engagement decreases.
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2. Attendees’ level of perceived interest in the topic
Even if attendees are engaged emotionally and actively, if they don’t perceive the content as interesting, they won’t engage. There are three types of individual interest the conference programming must capture to engage participants (Schiefele, U., 2009; Hidi & Baird, 1996; and Mitchell, 1993):
- Triggered situation interest is capturing the attendees’ attention. Starting with an activity or a controversial statement can be a great way to pique interest right from the start.
- Maintained situational interest is holding that attendees’ interest over an extended period of time. This means you’ll want to ensure your speakers keep their energy levels’ high, are well-spoken, and can read the crowd.
- Individual interest represents the attendees’ outlook toward the topic as needed now and in the future. So, you should aim to help attendees understand how this information can help them do their jobs better, or how they can use learnings in their everyday life. Connect the dots for them by providing real life examples, or asking them how they might use what they’ve just learned.
3. Attendees’ level of perceived importance of the topic
When you can challenge your conference attendees to focus on their highest life and professional goals – those required to be successful, compete and lead – then they will be more engaged. Additionally, conference attendees that feel they can learn the new information, understand it, and perform it successfully are more engaged.
So it could be helpful to survey attendees in advance to best understand their interests, whether they care about particular topics, how they best learn information, etc. Then, you can design tracks that best fit their needs, and ensure there’s hands-on learning, or short bursts of information followed by discussion groups, or even provide handouts with recap information.
Now that you know the factors of engagement that are important to address, let’s talk about a few ways you can put these learnings to use:
1. Make visuals work for you
Images make everything better: they’re what our brains pick up on fastest and what our brains need to improve memory and recall. So, it can be worth investing big time into making a visual impact when kicking off your conference. For example, amazing special effects (pink everywhere – carpet, chairs, walls…am I right?!), graphics, intro music, and laser lights are all tools in your kit to create a full emersion of the senses. Don’t have a big AV budget? No problem. Encourage your cameraman to pan his lens on the engaged crowd as people start pouring into the conference room. (The old baseball stadium trick!)
2. Provide value every minute
Nothing is more frustrating than experiencing a great opening only to be followed by fifteen minutes of dry announcements and future talk. Don’t start with speaker bios; introduce your leaders and sponsors after attendees have experienced the good stuff and appreciate the knowledge they’ve brought to the table. Kick off with one of the most popular topics you know your attendees are dying to hear about.
3. Make the end even better than the beginning
Finish your session as good (or better) than you start it, and you won’t have an early exodus. Don’t start packing up displays and your registration desk before your closing session. Recognize how important it is to leave a lasting impression that sends everyone home with smiles. Let your audience know, it’s really all about them. Save one of your best sessions for the end, encourage speakers to hang around to answer questions and take photos in a photo booth, encourage networking with a happy hour located on the way out – the sky is the limit!
What’s your favorite way (or trick you’ve discovered) to end your events? We’d love to know, so comment below!
Ready to make the most out of your next event? Discover meeting design tips that boost engagement.
This post was inspired and repurposed from Creating the Highly Engaged Conference Participant written by Jeff Hurt and published by Velvet Chainsaw.
The post Little Known Ways to Keep Your Participants Engaged to the Moon and Back appeared first on The Social Tables Blog.
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