Make Your Next Event Truly Experential!

As I reflect from my participation at AIME (Asia-Pacific Incentives & Meetings Expo) recently, I asked myself this question — how can you make your next event truly experiential?

To arrive at an answer to this conundrum, I wanted to share some of the learnings we gained from the test events that we ran last year as we prepared to launch our first product, PointedQ, this month.

First, let’s set some context using the Bartle multi-player gamer profiling framework. We’ve found it very useful for categorizing event audiences’ participation and engagement preferences, which in turn provides useful insight into the design of awesome events.

Bartle Player Type: Achievers are players who prefer to gain “points,” levels, equipment and other concrete measurements of succeeding in a game. They will go to great lengths to achieve rewards that confer them little or no gameplay benefit simply for the prestige of having it.

Audience Engagement Equivalent: A reward system that offers audience members points, badges, leaderboard, levels etc..

Bartle Player Type: Explorers dig around, are players who prefer discovering areas, creating maps and learning about hidden places. They often feel restricted when a game expects them to move on within a certain time, as that does not allow them to look around at their own pace.

Audience Engagement Equivalent: Scavenger hunt-styled games that involve audience members in the discovery of new products and hidden experience zones.

Bartle Player Type: Socialisers choose to play games for the social aspect, rather than the actual game itself. They gain the most enjoyment from a game by interacting with other players, and on some occasions, computer-controlled characters with personality. The game is merely a tool they use to meet others in-game or outside of it.

Audience Engagement Equivalent:Opportunities that allow audience members to help or otherwise engage with other participants (e.g. answering technical questions, or connecting people). Acknowledge them for their socializing impact, and offer them a role to play in your multi-day event, or post-event or your next event. Reward them for their socializing impact.

Bartle Player Type: Killers love to sow destruction, and prefer games that are high in carnage, action, and destructible environments. Many of these gamers also enjoy the opportunity to depart from the norm of being “the good guy” who comes to save the day. Instead, they will play on the side of evil or conquest. On the flip side, Killers also represent the archetype which is most interested in affecting their environment, so sandbox games in which they can take a direct hand in building (ordestroying) a virtual society will appeal to them as well.

Audience Engagement Equivalent:Create a persona representing a shared enemy of your audience (think industry enemy, key competitor etc.), and provide a mechanism for interacting (physically or virtually) with it. This could be something as simple as an actual shoot ‘em up game with customized pictures of your competitors’ logo. Or a lego building game or similar building game to create a virtual world where your product(s) is the killer product.

Other ideas for generating audience input and feedback that we’ve seen used very successfully include:

Reward your audience for being engaged:

• Points will allow you to motivate the right behaviours — more points for behaviours that you want to motivate more, and less for the less important behaviours.
• Don’t forget to give them prizes that they really want — consider even the “money-can’t-buy” lunch/coffee/1–1 with the keynote speakers. Those who score well will want to see themselves on the leaderboard and share their prize announcement with their networks via social media. Audience members tend to lean into the presentation more when they have something they think they can gain. Prizes that are only at the event — e.g. access to the VIP Suite or to a special party on the event day — will increase the changes that pre-registered attendees will actually attend.

Crowdsource your schedule:

• POLL your target audience community on what topics are of interest to them and what keeps them awake at night. You may already have a panel of advisers to help create your agenda, but what better way to engage your target audience by crowdsourcing the agenda.

Encourage interaction between the panelists and audiences BEFORE and DURING the panel session:

• If you can start as early as when the event date is announced, you can start polling questions before the event so that your registrants are engaged before they even show up, and they feel that their questions are likely to be answered at the panel session.
• Do snap polls at the event to get audience input and build the poll results into the panel discussion. Encourage your audience to share the poll results via social media to further amplify the discussion.
• Suggest to your speakers to run quizzes either at the mid-point of their presentation so that they can adjust their content based on audience comprehension and engagement. This feedback can potentially be useful for other upcoming speakers for the same event.

If you have new products you are launching, run a poll or quiz to see if your marketing messages prior to the events have been working so you have a benchmark to compare before you ask the same questions after the event.

Real-time engagement:

• respond at the event if possible to the specific audience member(s) with whatever feedback you are getting at the event from your audience. Whatever insights you can derive at the event is better served being responded to at the event while that particular audience member is there.

Post-event engagement:

• You can continue the conversations on your event site by having the video content/slides uploaded as soon as possible. Based on the insights you can derive from the polls and quizzes you have run during the event, you can also help with lead generation by targeting specific audience members with tailored call-to-actions, e.g. webinars with more advanced content, small discussion groups, networking meetups, special offers based on interest.

All this is of course possible as long as you ensure users are clear what data they are giving you and that you have their permission to follow up with them. Personally, I think that if users are provided a considered offer based on what you think they need, and users have given you permission with their, then users see the value.

I’d love to hear from any further suggestions to creating truly engaging and experiential event in 2014, and what results you obtained. Drop me a line at theresa@play2lead.com.au.

Originally published at play2lead.tumblr.com.