10 Easy Steps That Can Boost Attendee Satisfaction
When you’re organising an event, you can never forget about your attendees — unsatisfied guests make an unsuccessful event. Follow these 10 easy steps, and you’ll have no trouble keeping everyone engaged and entertained.
1) Social media.
People simply can’t put their phones down these days, so give them something to do with them. Set up a Twitter hashtag and encourage people to Tweet out thoughts and observations — even project them onto a big screen, or have speakers and moderators respond to the best ones if you can. Just make sure to moderate them first!
2) Involvement and interaction.
You can really boost engagement and satisfaction if your attendees are interacting with each other. There’s a lot you can do to encourage this: you could create the right physical environment for interaction, such as round tables or facing rows of chairs; you could set up networking sessions to get people talking with each other; or you could simply provide plenty of time between talks and seminars to let people meet one another.
3) Questions.
Getting your guests involved and engaged could mean doing something as simple as a Q&A session.
Attendees really feel like their concerns and observations are being listened to; Eventogy can make this even easier by providing a platform for submitting questions in real time. In doing so, you’re giving your guests the opportunity to actively influence the discussion, which can pay dividends in terms of their satisfaction.
4) New experiences.
Imagine row upon row of people, sitting in a lecture theatre, being spoken at for hours on end. If that sounds like your event, you might want to shake things up a bit. This is particularly important for an annual event. Try to avoid recycling speakers and themes from past years, and instead try to introduce something unique. For instance, something that took the form of a seminar one year could be reframed as a team exercise the next. Give your attendees something new to experience, and they’ll return satisfied.
5) Communication.
Obviously keeping your guests well-informed is important, but there is a limit. You’ll only put people off if you’re flooding their inboxes with email reminders, so just stick to a handful of short, snappy and engaging messages to keep them posted. Using social media will help you vary your communications up a bit; because only certain people use it, it will be far less intrusive than a constant stream of emails.
6) Convenience.
It can’t be stressed enough that making things convenient as possible for your attendees is sure to keep them satisfied.
This could mean making sure your event takes place somewhere that’s easy to get to, but if you really can’t host it round the corner, subsidising your guests’ travel might be an option. Similarly, making event registration quick and easy — something technology can help you with — is another convenient solution that will improve attendees’ satisfaction.
7) Remember who matters.
As you plan your event, you should never forget that the attendee is the most important person. After all, if you have a conference centre full of bored people milling around the place, you’ve failed in your aim to keep everyone interested and engaged. If you keep this in mind, you’re sure to put on an event that keeps all your attendees satisfied.
8) Personal touches.
At a big event, it’s easy for an attendee to blur into the crowd. As a result, small, personal touches can make a big difference to their satisfaction. This might be something as a simple as a personal note on each guest’s seat, or it might be tailoring communications according to the needs and agendas of each one. These small things, whether they’re automated or not, help to give each attendee the impression that someone is thinking of them.
9) Technology.
Using technology definitely adds an edge to your event.
Not only does it make organisation easier, but it can help get attendees involved, and add to their quality of life at the event. There are plenty of options, but we’d be remiss if at this point we didn’t plug Eventogy, which has a host of features that can help keep guests happy, including live polling, agenda timetabling, and instant messaging, among other things.
10) Listen to feedback.
Ultimately, it’s the guests who are the real experts: only they can tell you what they enjoyed, what bored them, and what got them engaged and interested. Provide a proper outlet for post-event feedback, and you’ll be able to correct the mistakes and emphasise what worked. Then, your next event will really be able to shine. Make sure to follow-up quickly, while the event is still fresh in your guests’ minds.
