Events work if the people at them are active and involved.
Without what we have all by now learnt to call engagement, no event — however rich, however interesting, however fine the venue or however compelling the speakers and exclusive the sponsors — can really work. Because, whichever way you turn it, the soul of any event is the people attending, and everything has to revolve around them: they are the engine of the whole machine. That makes involvement and participation crucial to every event and, by now, a genuine competition fought with attractions, resources and coups de théâtre.
But does all that really pay off?
Not always — just as putting on genuinely beautiful, engaging events does not always mean spending vast resources, so much as covering all the bases and actually giving people what they are looking for. So how do you do it without over-complicating the organisation of the event and the lives of the people behind it?
Here are some answers, distilled from nearly twenty years in the business.
1. What do people want when they attend an event?
Let us start at the beginning, with one of the hardest questions to answer. However much experience you have organising events large or small, in person or virtual, when it comes to people you can only have ideas about what they might want or expect from an event. How do you build one without that information and without risking getting it wrong? The answer, which may sound obvious but is nothing of the sort, is: by asking them. We have seen it more than once. We have seen gurus and experts rack their brains in brainstorming sessions that threw off sparks, all to create “the perfect event”; we have seen resources deployed without end and energy poured out with no thought for economy; and we have seen great successes, but also plenty of mountains that gave birth to mice. Why? Because the easiest answer often went unchosen — the one we could have had simply by asking a question. Creating surveys to send to attendees, even prospective ones, right from the earliest stages of designing an event can be a simple, effective strategy for planning better, more efficiently and perhaps more cheaply too.
So why not take the chance?
2. When the going gets tough
Here we are. Les jeux sont faits, to borrow Sartre’s words: the event begins. And now? Now it is over to the content — engaging, high-calibre content we will certainly have built and put in place. But what if that is not enough? In that case a rare and valuable ally in creating success is play. Yes, including and especially for adults.
Because, as children teach us, there is little more serious than play.
With adults we prefer to call it gaming, of course, and we call its application to work and professional settings “gamification” — but it is still play, and still enjoyment.
And if the experience you build is not standard but personalised — which is no longer hard to do, even on a modest budget — you will quickly discover that engaging people is far more within reach than you might think. We have seen company directors throw themselves into treasure hunts and games of skill far more energetically than we would have expected, including custom, faintly vintage versions of Pac-Man, all to reach the top of a leaderboard — provided everyone could see it.
Because nobody likes losing, guaranteed.
3. Build connections that last
We say it almost every day: one of the things people most want when they attend an event is the chance to widen their network of relationships, personal and professional alike. It is one of the highest value-added activities you can do at an event and therefore one of the most sought after and most diligently pursued. Giving people the chance to do it in the easiest, most useful and most enjoyable way is therefore quite unmatched in terms of results and value. And when the tools are within easy reach for organisers too, do we really want to risk leaving chips on the table? These same tools, moreover, can be formidable allies for organisers outside the event, after the event and between one event and the next — because if the relationships stay active, so does participation, and so does the connection to the event and its future editions.
And, as the world has always known, a warm audience beats a cold one.
As we have seen, the tools are there and so are the ideas (and these are only some of them; if the systems are customisable and flexible, everyone can build the ones that best deliver results in their own situation). So it is simply a matter of acting and shifting perspective, turning attendee engagement from a challenge to be wrestled with into a resource to be used for success.
Quite a shift, don’t you think?