All You Need to Know for Conducting an Interactive Conference

An important part of a successful and interactive conference is the engaged audience. Taking into account that the attention span has become increasingly short, conference organizers should allocate enough time when planning the event to be able to involve the attendees.

Here you can find some useful guides hat will help you stay connected with your audience during the whole conference and make it valuable both for you and your audiences.

1. Encourage audience engagement via live polls

An important part of an interactive conference is the engaged audience. One of the powerful techniques for effective audience engagement is conducting live polls. People don’t like to just sit and be talked at during the whole meeting. So don’t make your event a boring monologue, use innovative technologies to actively engage attendees.

Unlike kids, adults like quizzes and consider them challenging and entertaining. Use a live polling app to create quizzes with fun and educational questions.

To conduct free live audience polling and make quizzes easy and interactive, use Swift Polling, a live polling app which has many advantages:

• It is user-friendly.
• Doesn’t require an installation, making the process fast and easy.
• Enables users to send a text poll through the designated phone number as well as vote through web.
• Provides an opportunity to embed the polls in your presentation and show results on the big screen in real time.
• The free plan include up to 50 responses.
• Incorporate fun and interactive quizzes in your event as an entertaining and engaging break to your one-way speech.

2. Make Q&A sessions more effective

Q&A sessions are an important part of an interactive conference. To make sure that all the presented concepts, set goals and planned activities are clear to the attendees it’s important to organize effective and smooth Q&A sessions.

For that, it’s preferable to enable the audience ask questions earlier rather than at the end of the event: You do not have to finish your presentation or talk to be able to answer some questions in a short 5 minute Q&A before switching to the next topic or section of your presentation. Asking for questions at the end is a good method as well, but to ensure everyone is involved and no questions are just forgotten by the end, you can do short Q&A sessions on the go.

Moreover, with the help of a live polling app organizers can democratize the process by allowing all the attendees to submit their questions through text or web anonymously.

Swift Polling enables its users to “star” the questions which a moderator will find most important or relevant to discuss and show them in real time.

3. Empower the attendees to evaluate the meeting

According to the peak–end rule people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience. So the end part of an interactive conference should be organized in a way to finally engage and impress the attendees.

Again, a live polling app can be a great solution: through an online or a text poll organizers enable the audience to express their opinion on the overall conference.

Moreover, Swift Polling can also be used to create word clouds and ask the audience to describe the event with one or two words. Repetitive responses will be shown larger and in another color indicating the opinion of majority regarding the session.

Don’t be afraid deviate from set standards and organize a unique and interactive conference.