While planning your association’s next gathering in today's dynamic event landscape, you have likely heard that keeping attendees engaged before, during, and after is the cornerstone of a successful event. Yet many event organizers and proactive event planners still wonder what engagement really means and which tactics genuinely work to expand an event's reach.
We are here to demystify the concept, share valuable insights, and show how the right tools help you weave continuous audience engagement into every stage of the journey. This guide explores why it matters, which approaches create momentum, and how purpose built software can enhance event engagement without adding complexity.
What Is Attendee Engagement?
Attendee engagement is the level of interest and active participation guests demonstrate from first invitation to final follow up. It goes far beyond simple event attendance; the goal is to engage attendees so they contribute ideas, forge connections, ask questions, and complete activities that stick with them long after the lights come up.
It’s about more than just being present. You want to create an environment where attendees feel compelled to participate, such as sharing ideas, connecting with others, asking questions, and completing activities.
When attendees engage, the experience will become much more memorable. It can build a stronger connection with your organization and reinforce the positive impact your association or nonprofit has on members or your local community. It can be a key component of event success.
Example Of Using Engagement To Create A Deeper Impact
Let’s say your association hosts an event to educate builders and contractors about sustainable construction practices. To increase engagement, you set up learning-based activities and a reward system to encourage participation. As attendees go about each activity, they learn new information and skills they can apply in their work.
After they leave the event, they start using more sustainable materials during commercial builds and feel good about the changes they’re making. They even start getting more positive feedback from clients.
As the positive effects unfold, they continuously reflect on their experience at your event. It leads to your organization staying at the top of attendees’ minds and ready to participate when you reach out the next time.
Types Of Event Engagement
During event management and planning, you should consider the types of engagement to create well-rounded experiences. Three key types are: physical, emotional, and digital. What are they?
- Physical engagement: The physical actions taken during interactive activities at an event. That could include completing an activity with a small group, answering questions during a presentation, taking pictures, or shaking hands and networking with others.
- Emotional engagement: Creating experiences that lead to strong feelings or memories. For instance, a learning-based activity that leads to excitement upon completion, or a nonprofit providing testimonies about community members they helped, all are examples of emotional engagement that create an emotional connection with their mission.
- Digital engagement: Any digital event activities, such as virtual chats, games, or live Q&As through an event app. These are a great addition with the rising popularity of hybrid and virtual events to ensure everyone in attendance feels involved.
Why Is Attendee Engagement Important For Events?
Attendee engagement is important because it creates event experiences that lead to a greater sense of connection. When attendees engage, they feel like they are part of something, and it creates lasting memories. It can increase event success in both the short and long term.
Short-Term Benefits Of Engagement
Some of the immediate benefits you’ll see from engagement are:
- Higher attendee satisfaction rates: Attendees who actively participate tend to feel more satisfied with the experience. It helps to learn something new, build connections, or gain deeper insights into an industry. Those elements all provide an immediate impact on attendees’ lives that they can walk away with after the event.
- Increased event ROI: Active engagement can make it easier to generate sales. For example, participating in learning-based activities at your event could make attendees more interested in signing up for one of your association’s continuing education courses since they’ll see what they can learn from you through first-hand experience.
- Generate more high-quality leads: Attendees who have a great time at your event often turn into higher-quality leads. Whether you’re part of an association trying to get more members or a nonprofit seeking more volunteers, it can make it more likely that attendees fill out forms and are receptive when you contact them later on.
Long-Term Benefits Of Engagement
Ongoing benefits you could see after a highly engaging event are:
- Increased attendance at future events: Attendees who felt engaged at one event and reported high satisfaction are more likely to attend your next one. It can make it increasingly easier to promote and fill out your guest list.
- Additional word of mouth: Attendees participating and feeling involved in your event increases the likelihood that they’ll tell others about the experience. It can naturally boost awareness of your organization over time.
- Better brand perception and stronger sense of community: Continuously creating positive event experiences with active engagement leads to a better brand image and stronger community. It can help you become known as an association or nonprofit that cares about its members.
How To Make An Event More Engaging
How do you create more engaging events? Here are some top strategies to increase participation and interest before, during, and after the event.
Pre-Event Engagement
During event planning, you’ll want to think about engagement before the event even begins. Active interaction will keep attendees excited about the upcoming experience instead of leaving a lull between when they first hear about it and the event day. Some great ways to facilitate pre-event engagement are:
- Personalized invitations: Your invitations should be customized to the event’s theme, your industry, and your association’s message. You can also include personal details like the individual’s name on the invitation when possible.
- Teasers: Do you have exciting speakers, presentations, or activities lined up? Sending out some teasers or informational releases leading up to the event day can build more anticipation for the experience.
- Polls: Early polls asking registered attendees what they’re looking forward to most at the event or what topics they’d like discussed are a great way to make them feel involved. It can help when attendees have a say that makes a noticeable impact on the event.
You can use an event management system (EMS) to help with these aspects. For instance, you can create an event website and app to distribute teasers and polls, provide a sneak peek into event programs, and make custom invitations that integrate with an easy registration system.
Increasing Engagement During The Event
Once you reach the event day, it’s important to consider how you’ll add engaging elements that keep attendees interested throughout. Some great options to create interactive events are:
- Gamification: Finding ways to gamify your event can help with audience participation. For instance, you can use our Eventscribe EMS to create an interactive scavenger hunt through an event app that gets attendees moving around and working together.
- Breakout sessions and networking opportunities: Adding breakout sessions or encouraging networking helps your guests build connections that enhance your event’s impact. You can use an EMS to organize this process and direct conversations to help attendees connect.
- Make presentations interactive: Adding elements like live audience responses, Q&As, and polls during presentations will help attendees feel more involved while building better connections with each speaker. Event technology, like an EMS, can help make these live interactions possible.
Post-Event Engagement
After the event ends, you can still keep attendees involved and reinforce the positive experience they had. Ways to boost post-event engagement are:
- Follow up and ask for feedback: It’s a good idea to follow up after the event to thank attendees for coming. You can also distribute surveys or ask for feedback, which is a great way to see what went well and what you can improve. Listening to feedback helps show you care and makes your attendees feel like their voice matters.
- Distribute extra content: You can distribute extra content, such as learning materials or presentations, through your event app or website after the event to help attendees learn more. It’s a great option to give them extra ways to stay involved.
- Encourage social sharing: You can encourage attendees to keep sharing information and discussing industry challenges that they feel are relevant to what was discussed at the event. Your event app or website can help you organize these discussions.
Top Strategies To Increase Attendee Engagement At Your Next Event
To boost participation and interest further, here are some other top event engagement strategies to enhance the experience.
Storytelling And Immersive Event Design
Using storytelling is a great way to increase emotional engagement at your event. For example, you could have one of your association members share their story about how improving their skills through continuing education impacted their success to encourage and motivate attendees.
You can even add storytelling in immersive ways. For instance, you can build it into a scavenger hunt where, as attendees discover more clues, more of the story gets revealed.
Provide Incentives And Rewards For Participation
Another great engagement strategy is adding incentives or rewards for participating in activities. For example, you could create a points system that unlocks rewards after completing activities. Those rewards could include fun swag bags, access to courses, gift cards, discounts, or charitable contributions.
Personalizing Content And Experiences
You can personalize content and experiences at events in several ways.
One way is through pre-event polls that allow attendees to influence what activities are involved and what topics are discussed at the event to give them a voice.
You could also use breakout sessions and small group activities based on specific interests to help attendees gain a beneficial experience from the event.
Lastly, personalized networking, where you help connect like-minded individuals, can help facilitate better individual experiences.
What Makes A Good Engagement Strategy?
A well-rounded strategy will help ensure the changes you’re making are successful. An effective engagement strategy should include:
- Clear engagement goals and objectives: What would more engagement look like at your event? It can help to set numbers for this that you want to achieve, such as increasing live poll responses, questions asked, activity completions, or social media interactions.
- Understanding and segmenting your audience: Early surveys, polls, and assessing association member information can help you understand your audience better. You can even segment based on the needs of different groups, such as designing activities for professionals with 5+ years of experience and others for new college graduates.
- Engagement tactics aligned with the event’s format: The best activities can vary depending on whether your event is in-person, virtual, or hybrid. For instance, a hands-on small group project might be great for in-person events, whereas virtual breakout discussions would work better for virtual and hybrid events.
- Measuring engagement success: Tracking KPIs and key event data through an EMS can help you measure engagement success to determine if you reached initial goals. Then, you can decide what went well and what you can improve to boost engagement at future events.
- Collecting and implementing feedback: Listening to direct feedback from attendees is a great way to learn what they like and don’t like. That way, you can keep implementing more activities your audience wants to participate in.
Conclusion & Key Takeaways On Boosting Event Engagement
Many strategies are available to help you boost engagement at your next event.
A great place to start is looking at your audience. Who are they? What are their needs? How can your association or nonprofit help?
Then, create engagement goals and implement strategies that you feel align with your audience’s preferences. You might not get it all right on the first event, but listening to feedback and striving to improve each time will lead to better and better results.
If you’re looking for the right tools to implement your engagement strategy, Eventscribe, Cadmium’s event management software, can help.
How Eventscribe Can Help You Create More Engaging Events
Eventscribe is a full event management system built to meet the needs of association and nonprofit event planning. It offers a full suite of options that can help transform event engagement at each stage, such as:
- Launching a highly customizable interactive event website and mobile app
- Allowing live audience responses, polls, evaluations, and quizzes
- Adding gamification, such as creating an interactive scavenger hunt
- Distributing extra content before and after the event
- And more
On top of that, you get a full EMS for each stage of event planning. That includes registration, logistics, speaker and presentation management, abstract submissions and reviews, and sponsor management. Click here to learn more.
