4 Tips to Make Your Conference More Interactive

The format of many conferences haven’t change yet: it relies on the monotone speeches and standard presentations.

In this digital era, when people’s attention span has become extensively short, it’s time to think about modifying the contemporary conferences, delivering people not only information, but also the experience they expect to get.

To provide this, you should think about ways of engaging, collaborating and networking at your event.

Here are 4 useful ideas you can integrate into your conference to ensure you are meeting your guest’s expectations.

1. Know the attendees

The first step for interesting and interactive conferences is to know your audience and identify their knowledge and expectations regarding the topic. It will help to tailor the content to their needs, hence to make sure that the discussion is interesting to them.

The most effective and short way to organize it is to conduct real-time polls. To make the process much more effective, it’s recommended to do that through a user-friendly online platform such as Swift Polling. It enables to collect the feedback fast and easy and show the results in real time.

Let’s see what kind of polls can be helpful:

To identify the level of familiarity of the audience with the topic you can use multiple-choice polls at the beginning of the conference or before it.

You can also use word cloud to observe in what fields the attendees are working or studying. Audience members should send their entries through web or sms and the repetitive answers will be shown larger in another color.

2. Identify audience opinion

It’s difficult for your audience to sit and listen to a presenter for hours, even if topic interesting.So it’s important to further promote audience engagement.

For that, use innovative technologies and organize quizzes regarding the topic and let your audience share their opinions and experiences.

The audience members will be challenged and will see that their voices are heard. So, It provides the democratic part of conferences.

To conduct free live audience polling and make quizzes easy and interactive, use Swift Polling. It provides the anonymous part of quizzes, hence audience members will feel more comfortable to participate in polls and will be honest when expressing their opinion.

The gathered information can be shown in real time to kick off a discussion.

3. Run Games

Like kids, adults too like to be entertained.

To keep audience attention and refresh and energize them organize games regarding your topic.

For example, one of his events marketing guru Roman Daneghyan conducted game sessions, which helped him to make the audience engagement real.

He asked three questions to the audience in dedicated time slots: he demonstrated a picture of a product and asked the attendees to advertise it in one sentence.

Then he wrote down the first five answers, repeated them out loud for the audience, and told them to vote for the option they liked most.

He used Swift Polling to organize the process quickly and easily. Results were updated automatically, so attendees were able to watch it unfold.

The winners got gifts that Daneghyan prepared for them. The audience engagement succeeded.

4. Conduct democratized Q&A

Q&A sessions can be a great way to make sure that all the presented concepts and you presentation is focused.

Usually, Q&A is at the end of a conference. However, the traditional way of conducting Q&A sessions has many drawbacks:

• Audience has little time to submit their questions.
• Not all of the audience members save their questions for the end of the event, especially when some attendees feel tired and have lost interest.
• Some people don’t feel comfortable to raise their hands and ask questions.

In case of democratized Q&A audience ask questions earlier in the event. It’s possible to crowdsource questions before the presentation starts and the speaker can kick off the discussion with the best questions.

With the help of a live polling app, organizers can further democratize the process by allowing all the attendees to submit their questions and feedback by text or web. Swift Polling enables the host to “star” the questions which a presenter will find most important or relevant to discuss.

The anonymity is another advantage that the platform provides for the Q&A session.