Gamification a great way to engage your audience.

But what is it? Well for a start its one of the hottest buzzwords amongst event planners today. But is it really more than a buzzword? We would like to think so.

Gamification comes from the words, Game and Education and it tries to amalgamate the two, to drive engagement, connection and learning. It does this by integrating game like activities into events. Giving the audience more ways to interact and have fun whilst learning at the same time.

So how do you implement gamification into your meetings or events? Let’s look at a few ways of transforming your events.

Live Leaderboards

These are one of the easiest ways to gamify your event and a lot of events apps have this as part of their offering. The leaderboard encourage participants to engage in friendly competition with each other. You may get points for attending a stand at an event, answering questions or simply logging in with your social media accounts. By offering an incentive for the highest scorers, it’s sure to keep people engaged.

 

It’s Time for a Quiz!

We always have fun with Quiz’s and they are great for audience interaction and can create a real buzz among the audience. For this event why not use some audience response technology. Ask each table to nominate a team leader. Then ask the audience questions related to the previous speaker. The attendees have to interact with one another to decide which the correct answer is. All this drives engagement, networking and embeds the message of the previous speaker. Incentivise them by giving the winning table a spot prize.

 Interact with the Presenter

We have all been to an event where the speaker asks the audience to raise their hands. It’s not only painful for the speaker but for the audience too. From a speakers perspective it’s much better to have an engaged audience and one that asks questions and it’s a lot easier to create a connection when you have a dialogue rather than a monologue. So how do we change this? You can use audience engagement technology that allows the audience to ask questions from their phone using a micro site, Twitter or voting keypads. Then rewarding the audience for the most engaging questions, these can be all showcased on a big screen.  This means no more standing up in the spot light yet still giving those shy people a voice.

The audiences key takeaway

Really like this idea from the guys at Sli.do ; challenge attendees to share at least one takeaway: You ask the audience to send through one thing that they will take away from today’s session the audience can then democratically vote which is the most relevant. You can then showcase this on a big screen to reinforce the messages from today’s session. It’s also more powerful because it’s from an audiences perspective not the presenter.

So what can we takeaway from this? Lets try be creative when engaging the audience, driving connection and embedding our messages. Audiences are there to learn, to be entertained and to have some fun a long the way.  Next time you have a meeting or an event, think about ways you can gamifiy it.

 

Conor Hyland

Audience Alive.com