Engagement and social connection are talked about as essential ingredients of every event, but why exactly are they? Stopping to ask that question, especially if you organise events for a living, can help you do the job better while saving time, resources and energy. It is also a good way to find the best solutions for reaching your goal and to make the whole process more efficient.
Here are some answers — three, to be precise.
1. Creating a positive mood, more receptive to what is on offer, commercial proposals included
Opportunities to socialise and take part are a good way to build a positive atmosphere across the whole event. When attendees are encouraged to mix, they usually feel more at ease and interact more with each other and with everyone else involved, from speakers to sponsors to exhibitors. A good atmosphere, positive and relaxed, also makes people more open and receptive to proposed activities and content, whether tied to the event itself or to the initiatives — commercial ones included — of sponsors and investors.
2. Encouraging networking, the main reason people attend an event
We know it well: one of the greatest things an event can give the people who attend is the chance to consolidate and widen their network of relationships, professional or personal. People go to events first and foremost to connect with each other and build their social capital and, in corporate, institutional and membership settings, to improve their standing by creating and strengthening ties with the people they consider valuable in their sector. Creating the conditions that make this not just possible but easy is therefore one of the highest-value things an event can produce, and certainly one of the most appreciated.
3. Improving satisfaction and the reputation of an event
Nothing especially new here either: engagement and participation are directly linked to how people judge an event and therefore to its reputation. The arithmetic is simple: the more people take part in an event and feel involved in what it offers, the more they invest — personally as well — in its activities. As a result, they not only help improve both the quantity and the quality of those activities, they also form a more positive overall opinion, because they were part of it, and feel more motivated to pass that opinion on to others.
Once you know why you might want to focus on engagement and social connection at your next event, how do you get there in practice? Of the many tools available — and the choice naturally depends on the type, the size and even the length of the event — we have picked three that we consider the most versatile and therefore the most widely applicable.
1. Gamification
Everyone likes to play, or almost everyone, and it is usually more a question of which games than of games yes or games no. Gamification can activate both practical and psychological aspects, and this makes using it not only a matter of fashion and trend, but a strategic choice. Its flexibility also makes it particularly effective for engaging the audience and improving the overall event experience in a way that is highly targeted, strategic and measurable.
2. Surveys and quizzes
Other useful tools for building engagement and social connection are, of course, surveys and quizzes, which help you get to know the people at an event better and make them feel more involved, but also give more targeted answers to what they need. Thanks to technology, surveys and quizzes have also become quick and agile tools: they can be built in a few minutes and sent in real time to every attendee’s smartphone, while the results can be used to drive further involvement, for example by displaying them in shared, communal spaces.
3. Creating physical and virtual spaces for informality
Partly connected to the previous point is the question of spaces and places — physical or virtual, it hardly matters these days — that you can use to help along (or to prevent, depending on your goal) relationships and participation. Being clear from the design stage about which and how many spaces people will be able to use to socialise, and how those spaces can support and encourage participation, is therefore essential if these exchanges and networking moments are to become genuine strategic assets for your event. One way is to combine the real and the virtual, in-person and online, in forms that give new meaning to the word “hybrid” — a meaning centred on how it works and on whether it is genuinely effective.
Are there other reasons and other tools?
Certainly, and fortunately so, because in the world of events the limit is now more often imagination than resources, even though resources are anything but unlimited. Technology can be a very good ally for doing more with less and for making up for certain constraints with solutions that often add value to the final result.
Want to see it in action? Request a live demo of SharEvent and we will look together at what we can do.