In-person conferences are making a welcome return after nearly two years of Zoom events, meetings, and impromptu happy hours. We couldn’t be more thrilled about this opportunity to meet and interact with hundreds of like-minded individuals all in one place.
It’s great that they’re making a comeback, but the organizers have their work cut out for them. In 2023, attendees at in-person conferences will not be satisfied with a presentation consisting of a few boring slides shown on a projector. So, accommodating both in-person and virtual attendees, we have a solid 5 ideas to boost the attendance!
Five Ways to Boost Your Next Conference or Meeting
Here are five ideas for in-person conferences that are sure to attract attendees, keep them interested, and make them realize how much they’ve missed face-to-face gatherings.
1) Incorporate Gamification
Gamification is used to make participating and interacting more enjoyable and beneficial.
All of your guests, both physical and digital, will have a better time if you incorporate some friendly competition into the event by making it a game.
Initiate amicable competitions among your audience members by use of Activity Challenges. Giving points to audience members who take part in competitions is a great way to increase engagement. Attendees might earn ten bonus points for every business card they share, whether digital or physical. Give them a chance to redeem their points for a wide range of prizes.
On the other hand, you might host a photo contest on your activity feed. Offer a prize to the person whose photo utilizing the event’s hashtag receives the most likes.
You may save a lot of money on event expenses by using gamification rather than providing gifts. Investigate other cost-cutting strategies for your online convention.
2) Select Speakers Who Will Captivate Both In-Person and Online Attendees
The means through which you may engage guests at an in-person versus a virtual event vary. To effectively engage with attendees through engaging conference ideas and experienced speakers, you will need both experience and practice.
Do not assume that all of your speakers must be present. You may combine in-person and online guest speakers. Just ensure that each of your virtual speakers has a high-quality camera and microphone to provide the highest possible video and audio quality, especially if you’re broadcasting it to an in-person audience.
Your in-person speaker should keep a laptop nearby so they may see online poll results and questions to maintain the interest of both groups.
3) Looking for Virtual Engagement Activities That Are Simple to Implement? Include Polls
Polling facilitates audience engagement with your presenters in real-time, whether they are providing input prior to or during a presentation. Polling also enables the audience to suggest themes for panel discussions. Polls can be as straightforward as a star rating or single or multiple-choice questions.
Consider conducting a poll with a limited time limit to encourage people to respond before the poll ends. Try to conduct a poll about every 15 minutes to aggressively engage your audience.
Using your event app, your in-person audience may respond to polls in real-time alongside their virtual counterparts who are completing polls on their PC. This improves the accuracy of your event’s polling results and unifies both audiences throughout sessions.
4) Maintain Frequent Breaks During the Conference
You must provide attendees with some space and time. You must incorporate numerous breaks throughout every session. In addition, you may utilize gamification or other techniques to keep consumers engaged on your site. But at least provide them time to recover from the last session and prepare for the next one.
Want to shake things up? Bring a laptop or tablet to the in-person breakout areas to combine in-person and virtual sessions. This allows an online attendee to communicate with in-person guests.
5) Attract audiences by including an entertainment act.
Virtual or hybrid conferences do not have to be solemn. Bring in a performance to entertain your audience, such as a magician, comedian, or musician, to lighten the atmosphere.
Because virtual audiences’ attention spans are shorter, presenting interesting and exciting content helps them to take a mental “breather” and relax, so that when your regular programming resumes, they’ll be sharper and more interested.
The entertainment might encourage guests to talk about their common experiences.
All in all,
Thus, the aforementioned strategies might be utilized to improve participation at your virtual event in 2023. You can achieve 100 percent success by adhering to these engagement suggestions for virtual conferences. The users can not resist an event with such features.
We hope that this post will assist you in organizing a very engaging virtual conference. If you are still in doubt, make an appointment with Team DOREMi, we will help you out with an effective conference meeting.