November 2021 | EventUp Planner

In today’s spotlight series, you will learn more about event engagement from Samuel J. Smith, founder of the event gamification software, Social Point. Sam produced hybrid events in a prior life and led the MPI research team that developed the baseline research for virtual and hybrid events. And today, he helps exhibitors and marketers make virtual and in-person events fun through event gamification.

Attendee Types and Event Engagement Expectations

Pre-pandemic, Sam wrote an article about the myth of 100% attendee engagement. The concept he shared is more relevant than ever. In this article, he mentioned the existence of six attendee types: creators, critiquers, collectors, shares, joiners and inactives. Each attendee type will have different needs from technology and therefore, they’re going to require different engagement experiences.

Whether it’s an in-person, hybrid, or virtual event, you will have some version of these attendee types in your event. For example, a creator is someone who enjoys creating things, they take a white piece of paper and they can draw or come up with lots of ideas. Creators represent about 10% of one’s audience.

Critiquers can’t really come up with anything. But if they see what you did, they can write 40 pages of why that’s terrible and need to change. And you want to embrace that behavior, because that’s actually about 30 to 40% of your audience.

Can you create an event experience where creators are engaged, but also critiquers? Instead of letting them fight against each other, how can they enjoy working together to create something better? If a creator makes a post on Facebook, you get critiques to comment on it. So how can you do that inside your event? Those are the types of questions you need to ask.

There’s another behavior called the collector: they’re the ones who run around a tradeshow and collect all the things, whether pens, buttons, or notepads. We’ve designed events that had buttons all around the venue. When they realized there were different buttons, they were trying to collect the full set. Another way to think about this is using gamification to collect badges for example.

The other three attendee types are shares, joiners, and inactive. There are people out there that will join everything. They don’t really do much when they join, but they just like to sign up for things. And there’s a group where people like to share, they just like to tell people about other things. And then of course, there’s always people who will do nothing. No matter what, no matter how hard you try, they will do nothing.

Once we understand this concept it’s easier to think about what types of experiences we can create in our events to drive the event engagement from these different attendee profiles. In a chat, one of the tools that we like to use is to have a topic-based conversation. This can motivate creators and critiquers to participate. Having a moderator is important to get that conversation going, even before the session starts. We noticed that having these easy, fun questions, in the beginning, can help to continue driving engagement later.

To fulfill the needs of collectors, we have done scavenger hunts or multi-day event gamification, offering different badges for them to collect. For the collector, it is not about being on the top of the leaderboard. The reward is in collecting those badges.

In order to build opportunities for most people to engage, we have what I call a layered engagement approach. You will not please everyone all the time. So rather than putting all the energy in one session, try to think across the entire event and give opportunities for different attendee types to engage when it makes sense for them too. In the past, we’ve built a chart to find what engagement opportunities existed. That can make sure we tried to appeal to all people at some point during the event.

Measuring Event Engagement Success

Considering this layered engagement approach for unique attendee types you will find out that you will never have 100% engagement across all opportunities you provide. For chat and Q&A you may have 50% of your audience participating, while for gamification you may get 40% of the audience engaged, but people who engaged with the chat and Q&A are not necessarily the same as those who engaged with the game.

For games managed with SocialPoint, we have a dashboard that shows how many players you got, how many games were played, how many questions were answered, and so on.

But you need to go down another level because some of those numbers are just vanity metrics. If you want to know if you hit your event objectives, you need to dive deeper. For example, our clients designed a trivia game and they can evaluate the questions by learning objectives. So you can report out on how well players performed against those marketing objectives.

The players don’t know anything about all these marketing objectives and learning objectives, they’re playing the game. But on the back end, we have that data grouped. Therefore we can then report on it and it helps event planners in decision making.

We do a lot of sales, kickoffs and national sales meetings as well. So you can have the Northeast team versus the Southwest team and look at the data in that way too. That helps you to find out why one team is outperforming the other based on those learning objectives.

For marketers interested in lead capture, you can see where a person exists in the customer journey. So they look at engagement on these virtual events to determine if they’re a new customer, in the decision-making process, or in the research phase, for example. This can help to confirm if the event has helped to move leads down the funnel. This can support the sales team in prioritizing who to follow up with, too.

Building Your Tech Stack to Support Event Engagement

In the past, in a world pre-COVID, we would talk a lot about the concept of all-in-one event management software. But what we’re seeing now more and more, especially with the increasing needs for virtual and hybrid events, it became more clear that it’s nearly impossible to have one platform that can do everything and do everything well.

With this, we’re diving deeper into the concept of having one strong foundational tool for event management and plug in other tools to support in different areas. And Attendease and Social Point is a great example of that. You can surely build your event with Attendease, you can design a fully branded event website, the registration flow, manage the event agenda, but that gamification component would be best managed by another platform like Social Point. To learn more about how to incorporate gamification into your next event, contact Social Point.

We have recently concluded our first 3X30 Live Talks Series with event expert guests. In our last conversation, we discussed hybrid event agenda design with guest Mahoganey Jones, CEO & Founder at Event Specialists. Mahoganey shared some insightful ideas around agenda design and debunked some myths around hybrid event budget and content delivery. Read the key takeaways below.

“Hybrid events have been around for a long time, they were here pre-pandemic. Since the pandemic has hit though, we have changed how we approach our event agendas. We were first in panic mode to pivot in-person events to virtual formats. And without thinking, or allowing us to rethink what the goal of that event really is, we didn’t question if the agenda needed to be matched ‘one for one“. Read below some considerations from Mahoganey pertaining to hybrid events.

Hybrid Event Technology

We’ve been using the pandemic as a crutch or as a limitation. We keep hearing “we can’t do” or “we can’t accomplish”, versus how we can still accomplish our goals within limitations. We can use the limitations as a positive VIP level experience in-person, ultra VIP online… and look through a different perspective.

Technology was never meant to limit how we design events. It was meant to enhance what we’re doing while allowing us to hit our goals and objectives. We’re looking at the technology first, and then designing our agendas to match the bells and whistles of a platform versus seeing what our agenda needs to accomplish, and then finding the technology that is best suited to deliver that message. We’re putting the cart before the horse.

In this process, I feel like we forgot about the goals and what we’re actually looking to accomplish. Not every platform is meant for every type of event. We’re literally just building based on what the platform can do.

Attendee Journey in a Hybrid Event

I truly believe that a hybrid event is one customer journey that you’re taking your attendees through, whether they’re attending in-person or online. I feel like the intersection is important, and we design elements to ensure each audience gets exactly what they need. But we also need to understand that they’re an audience as a whole.

There’s no one true experience. We don’t need to deliver every session for the in-person audience and for the virtual audience. When we talk about the intersectionality between the two audiences, let’s think of how we can ensure that both audiences are getting the experience you’re looking for them to have.

If you think of the analogy of a hockey game: the in-person audience is watching the game happen live, listening to the announcers, etc. The audience who’s watching from home is not going to catch everything being thrown in the in-person audience. Does it make them feel like they’re not part of the same experience though? Absolutely not.

It’s about being mindful of how you’re ensuring your audiences are getting what they need from the event so that you’re not leaving anyone out. You don’t need to 100% translate the entire agenda between in-person and virtual. Virtual audiences don’t necessarily have to ask questions for every session if that may not be the goal of each session. We also don’t have to broadcast every single session.

We can be selective on the content that’s best delivered to each group. For example, entertainment can be great for both audiences, but it’s not always great to share workshops with two audiences.

When you’re planning your event agenda, create a spreadsheet to see how the flow is going to happen. See where you can put those intersectionalities together. And that the in-person audience and the online audience is getting a feel for that experience that you’re looking to deliver.

In-Person X Virtual Event Content

One thing the pandemic has also been great and afforded us as event producers is the ability to shorten content. TEDx talks are short, concise, and 10-20 minutes long for a reason. I don’t know when all of a sudden, we decided that we needed 90-minute keynote sessions. But the pandemic has allowed us to shorten a lot of things. We can now shorten that five-day conference. Still deliver the same bang for your buck, but in two to three days versus five.

For medical conferences and other conferences where there are CEUs or credits associated with the content, the sessions would have to be a certain amount of time to meet those criteria. Though there is no hard and fast rule that says all of those sessions have to happen on one day, four or five days consecutively.

We should have a look at how to best deliver the content. Spreading your content out doesn’t mean you’re diluting your content. It means you’re also opening your mindset and your audience’s ability to attend different sessions at work for them. With cross time zones, there’s now a hidden virtual audience that we didn’t know existed. We’ve opened up these opportunities to reach larger audiences, we’re truly global in the content that we’re delivering. So how can we best maximize that for our organizations?

Hybrid Events Budget

Let’s debunk the myth that says you need two or three times more budget to produce a hybrid event. Pre-pandemic, we would normally have a pretty complete in-person agenda and then the virtual was always that afterthought. When you’re looking at your agenda, your event content should help determine what you can actually deliver online.

Hybrid Event Planning Considerations

I was always a firm believer in lighting and sound. Without lighting and sound in any conference, it falls flat. For a hybrid experience, we have to ensure that the sound and the lighting of the in-person audience can be translated to the virtual audience. So using that to your advantage means you can use it as a design element for the in-person audience, it also creates a beautiful feed for the virtual audience so that they’re able to see and hear the speakers with clarity.

For example: have your presenters and audience Q&A using a microphone, so that the audio can be captured for the virtual audience. Or, alternatively, train your speakers to make sure that they repeat the question that was asked from the in-person audience to allow the virtual audience to hear it as well. Lighting is one of those things that almost always becomes an afterthought.

Personally, I always work with the AV company, see what you already have in the room, see what you’ve already paid for, and see how you can allocate that to make sure that it’s meeting the needs of both the in-person and the virtual audience.

Plus, reconsider the venues that you’re working with. The pandemic has allowed venues to redesign their own spaces so that it can work for you. Look at what is already built-in. Do they have the technology to support it? Do you need that massive room or can you go into a smaller room? We’re seeing the rise of these virtual studios that you can go to that have space and be able to accommodate what you’re looking to accommodate.

Event Planning Resources from Mahoganey Jones

One thing I like to start with is an exercise called the SSK Method: Start – Stop – Keep. It’s a tool that is valid when re-imagining what your event could look like. So you ask your team:

What would you like us to start doing?
What would you like us to stop doing?
And what would you like us to keep?

And within that exercise we can actually make decisions and that you are hitting the mark from an internal perspective. You can pick up on some of those cues to see what you can start doing, what you can keep and see what you can stop.

The one-page Event Business Plan (download free here) is how I like to drive what happens in the event overall. I also use it as a tool to drill down what is actually going to land on the agenda and what is going to happen. The one-page business plan takes all of the different elements that you are going to cover in the event, drill down to one page so that you understand the mission, the target audience, the goals, and the KPIs you’re looking to meet. With that being listed front and center, and very concise, it’s a lot easier to understand your goals and to support your agenda decisions.

Conclusion

The pandemic is allowing us the opportunity to redesign and rethink what the in-person X virtual experience can look like. It’s allowing us to redesign what the event experience can look like, and to drill down to the core of what our agenda should and could look like.

This is a good time to step back and think about your event goals first, and then find the best technology, the best attendee journey, the best content format, etc. to support those goals. We don’t need to provide the exact same experiences to both audiences, but the same outcomes. You can watch the full conversation with Mahoganey here.

Month: November 2021

Spotlight: The truth about event engagement with Samuel J. Smith