Ensuring a great attendee experience is not only crucial for the immediate success of your event, but also essential for fostering lasting engagement and ensuring participants keep coming back for more. From networking opportunities to streamlining the registration process, there are many ways to boost audience engagement.
If you’re looking to enhance your audience members’ experience at your event, below are some clever and affordable conversation-starting ideas that will make your event more memorable and engaging:
Multi-Sensory Ideas
Increase your attendees' experience and make your events more memorable by utilizing more of your attendees’ five senses:
- Use a visual mood board, marker artist’s drawings, or a giant mind map as an event installation rather than written material, notes, or an event schedule.
- Have guests choose surprise-recipe cocktails based on a shape, color, sound, or concept.
- Cater breakfast or coffee outside or hire mobile food trucks to incorporate the outdoors which can double as a networking session.
- Have presentations wired into the main ballroom, the pool area, or the creative lounge so attendees are free to move around and get the most out of the event and the space.
Crowd-Sourced Installations
Crowd-sources installations bring out a sense of ownership in participants who will spread the word:
- Create a graffiti or cork discussion board where guests can share messages, attendee bios, business cards, unique offers, reminders, pictures, and more.
- Utilize a specific social media hashtag to get attendees’ thoughts on a key subject or question.
- Host a series of rapid-fire five-minute, 20-slide presentations that let multiple speakers quickly share their passions, bold ideas, or news ways of problem-solving
- Use Pinterest to create a large-scale visual backdrop, and display it throughout the event.
- Have attendees write their goals on tags or props that are then used to create an installation.
- Generate merchandise, program content, or publish the results out of the contributions as a takeaway memento for the event.
- Create a mobile app for your attendees to share their thoughts in real time, participate in Q&A's, and streamline the registration process.
- Use the contributions as a basis for pre- and post-event viral marketing campaigns.
Get Personable
Fostering connections and breaking the ice among event attendees is a crucial element of creating a vibrant and engaging atmosphere. At TED2012, they took an innovative approach to ensure that guests could connect and socialize without the common "first meal syndrome" where people typically grab a plate and eat by themselves. Instead, TED2012 assigned everyone a random number and arranged picnics on the grass. As a guest, you'd search for the picnic basket marked with your designated number, sit down, and form connections with those around you. The picnic setup encouraged spontaneous conversations, transforming strangers into instant friends.
Moreover, the oversized name tags at TED2012 were intentionally designed to spark conversations. Each name tag required attendees to list three different topics they were open to discussing. This simple yet effective strategy made it easy for people to initiate conversations, ensuring that attendees felt more at ease and engaged with one another.
At LAI Live, we attend or are involved in almost 2,000 events every year, ranging from intimate industry gatherings to large-scale, renowned events such as TED and SXSW. Our goal is to curate and share the "best of the best" in meetings and share these experiences with our clients, so that great events and great design are available at any budget. By staying at the forefront of event trends and best practices, we are committed to helping our clients create extraordinary and engaging events that leave a lasting impact.
in taking your event to the next level, contact us!