Top 5 proven event engagement ideas to win your attendees  

Creating a dynamic and interactive experience for your attendees requires skill and creativity with event engagement. If you feel your engagement efforts are falling flat or are just struggling with how to best engage your audience, this article will share some event engagement strategies to help create a big impact!

Understanding event engagement

Event engagement is reflective of attendees’ overall involvement in an event. It’s not just a question of how well attended the event is, but the attention and emotional connection invested by the people attending the event. It is the active and meaningful involvement of participants in the event, which will ultimately create a dynamic, interactive, and memorable experience.

The three stages of event engagement

The three stages of event engagement are:

• Pre-event engagement
• Engagement during the event
• Post-event engagement

Understanding what’s appropriate for the phase of the event you are in should improve the engagement strategy overall.

How to build an attendee engagement strategy

The key to building an attendee engagement strategy is understanding how to minimize distractions and hold your attendee’s attention. Granted, a quality event may have a lot going on–planners will need to manage activities strategically to keep things running without getting overwhelmed. Attendees could be pulled in multiple directions via different activities and options.

Focusing on a strong content track that’s relevant to your attendees and creative content delivery is the core of keeping your audience immersed in the experience.

Top 5 proven event engagement ideas

Here are 5 tried and true best practices to follow when building event engagement. Each of these ideas should represent a broad part of your engagement strategy. We’re even elaborating with additional ideas to help you get started.

1. 1. Use engaging content and experiential sessions

It may seem obvious to say “provide quality content”, but your engagement strategy for content should reach beyond providing relevant and polished speakers. Don’t skimp on your production quality (as far as your budget will go), and if your speakers and presenters are inexperienced, make sure they receive some training, rehearsals, and resources beforehand to help them connect with the audience.

Immersive experiences (including entertainment) and interactive workshops can be even better for engagement. In a hands-on workshop, attendees are prompted not just to listen or watch but to do. Q&As (virtual or in-person) are also excellent ways to get your attendees engaged–if nothing else, people pay attention just to see if their questions are answered.

Here are another couple of tips for in-person engagement: First, it can be beneficial to include breaks for wellness or just mental refocusing. This is an area where scheduling entertainment activities may come in (particularly in an online event), or a physical activity wellness break could fit into an in-person event. Second, everyone likes freebies and/or prizes, so incorporating swag, giveaways, or contests with prizes into your program will get attendees more engaged in the experience.

1. 2. Provide networking opportunities

Networking shouldn’t be a distraction from your event content–in fact, build it right into the structure of the event. Whether there is a physical space for networking, or the ability for virtual participants to live chat and connect, aside from learning about featured products or participating in main activities (speakers, workshops, etc.) the top way that event attendees get value from in-person or virtual events is being able to network with one another.

At virtually any business-related event the objective of attendees is to increase their connections and contacts. In some cases, such as enabling a group chat function or setting up interactive workshops, you can effectively combine content with opportunities for the audience to network with one another.

1. 3. Pay attention to pre-event engagement

The lead-up to an event is a great opportunity to start engaging people. Social media activity is one of your best tools pre-event: creating a buzz on social networks, creating a hashtag, and creating event-related content (even bite-sized clips or direct communication with registrants is also a winner during the event run-up.

Not only can you send personalized messages and invitations via email or text to confirmed or prospective attendees, but you can also use polling and survey tools in advance to find out what’s most relevant to your audience. This can help refine how you’re able to keep discussions and activities on track to provide what matters, or even help shape your event through the planning process! In either case, you’re sure to learn more about your audience.

1. 4. Gamify!

Gamification is a great event engagement strategy that can be employed particularly effectively at virtual or hybrid events or any event with an integrated technological component. If you’re unfamiliar, gamification is exactly what it sounds like incorporating game-like elements into your content, usually in the form of event-related challenges to earn incentives, points, or specific rewards. Completing location-specific tasks, responding to polls or surveys, demonstrating topical knowledge in quizzes, and other individual or collaborative activities encourage participation.

1. 5. Follow up

Just as you shouldn’t ignore generating pre-event engagement and interest, you should also pay attention to post-event engagement! In other words, following up is crucial–we’ll detail how and why a little further on.

It’s worth noting virtual and hybrid events can deploy and measure event engagement strategies more effectively due to their technical, quantifiable nature. But more about measuring engagement in the next section!

Measuring event engagement

The key ways to measure event engagement are:

• Active participation: Potentially the clearest metric. How many people have registered or attended? Reading the room at an event, does the audience seem to be paying attention? Are they raising hands, clicking, or responding to quizzes or questions if prompted?

• Social media activity: Social media is also a highly measurable means to engage. Social may not be tied directly to your event, but even so, are you getting traffic? Follows? Mentions?

• Session feedback and ratings: Direct feedback is extremely desirable, the only trick is that it depends on attendees being willing to participate. Keep an eye on the number of responses vs. audience numbers to decide if you’re getting a representative sample.

• Relationship building: Successful networking can be more of an intangible from an event, however measuring this type of engagement is an excellent point for soliciting feedback from the audience. Just note the above bullet.

• Meaningful interaction: This can be another intangible, especially for in-person events. For virtual or hybrid events, however, this can turn out to be the most measurable metric! Did people interact with the feature you wanted them to? Are they logging out during a particular presentation or piece of content? Tying back to the first bullet point, are you seeing the audience actively participating?

Challenges in event engagement and solutions

Ultimately the measure of event engagement reflects how much attendees actively participate and gain something they value from the event program. Easy, right?

Understanding event engagement and creating effective strategies to improve it will pose a challenge. Particularly when working in virtual and hybrid events, the complexity goes beyond just the content you are offering. You need to consider the means of delivering the content, and aspects of participation and fun that can be inserted into the program. However, the advantages of technology-driven events like hybrid and virtual means that you can also receive functional, measurable feedback in real time.

Post-event engagement ideas

In addition to simply messaging post-event “thank you’s” you can request feedback and testimonials, offer continued networking opportunities for attendees, and potentially repurpose recorded event content as on-demand viewing for registrants or the general public. Material gathered and posted this way can serve as an event recap as well as both general knowledge and a teaser of your upcoming events and content.

Meet Kaltura virtual events: create, manage, and measure all your events on a single platform using customizable templates for every need.

• Last but not least, we’d like to introduce Kaltura Events as a best-in-class solution for virtual and hybrid events. If you’re looking for engagement support, Kaltura can improve and track all aspects of your event engagement as well as offer a suite of features to empower you through all steps of event planning and execution.

• Kaltura Events is loaded with interactive options and gamification including leader boards, badges, certifications, polls and quizzes, and a lot more. We’ll keep your audience engaged, active, and attentive throughout any event. Best of all, we love data and can give you the insights you need to measure your event performance–our platform provides a software tool to gather data and generate reports for you on key moments.

• Kaltura Events enables us to share a bonus 6th event engagement idea: to use the Kaltura Events AI assistant. The AI assistant will monitor audience engagement in the background and notify you when attention is dropping with on-the-fly suggestions on how to increase engagement in real time!

• We encourage you to take a free trial or request a demo, and let us demonstrate how Kaltura Events can positively impact attendance, engagement, and ROI while providing you with a seamless, fully brandable event creation platform.

Summary

There’s still quite a bit to talk about and consider regarding event engagement, but we think that making the most of best practices will get you well on your way to mastering the art. With the event ideas presented (and a world-class virtual event platform), you’ll soon be making headway with audience engagement and delivering more value to both yourself and attendees. As event successes begin stacking up, you’ll also get a better sense of what’s working for you and possibly even come up with your own event engagement ideas. We hope that our advice and ideas give you a strong foundation on which to build your future event engagement strategy!