Ways to Make Your Event More Fun and Engaging
Darryl Scotti 15 June 2018
Increasing engagement of the audience at a company event is important for hosting successful events continuously. Engagement of the audience makes your event fun, interactive and promotes awareness and growth of the brand.
Ensuring engagement of your audience not only improves the experience of guests, but also enables you to collect rich audience data. In order to increase audience engagement, you must make your event fun and engaging. How can you make your event more fun and engaging? By using the strategies we have highlighted in this post.
Focus on the Goal of the Event
Booking the hotel conference room won’t make your event successful if the activities you’ve planned for your audience fall short of their expectations. First, focus on matters that are important for achieving the overall objective of your event such as learning activities and speakers. Then plan the venue, travel, food, entertainment and lodging once you have made sure that you have the budget to afford the major attractions.
Focus on the Theme
A themed corporate event is much more engaging and fun than a normal event. An effectively themed event will enable attendees to fully engage in the event experience and accept the activity, mandate or challenge posted by your event. How can this be accomplished through a theme?
A theme that is well-thought-out and well-designed creates an interactive, engaging and unique storyline that unfolds as the event progresses. Each unique aspect of your theme adds to the story of your event in some way. This ensures that attendees are truly participating in your event and not only attending it.
The theme must be weaved into all aspects of your corporate event. You can make this happen by encouraging attendees to wear outfits that align with the theme, create a special playlist of unique thematic music and choose dining and décor options that reflect the theme of your event.
Build Buzz before the Event
Providing basic information to attendees like telling them where they need to be for the event and at what time isn’t enough to build excitement. Go beyond this basic agenda. Create a compelling invitation, provide your audience with a teaser on all the activities of the event and share the information about your event on social sites.
For example, a few weeks before the event, start building excitement among your audience by sending attendees an email that provides the weather forecast, the menu for the dishes you’ll be serving or a visual presentation of the activities you have planned for them. This will build engagement and enthusiasm that attendees will bring over into your event. Attendees will be prepared and ready to participate in your event and that will make your event more fun and engaging.
Plan Compelling Speakers and Sessions
People are attending your event to network, learn and share tips, experience or information. They wouldn’t like your event, if it doesn’t offer them anything. So, give them what they want by bringing first class speakers to your event.
By organizing informative and compelling sessions by famous speakers, you can increase the engagement of your audience and make the event more interactive. This way, more attendees will want to attend your event. The more participants join the event, the more fun and engaging your event will become.
Get Senior Leadership Involved
Presence of the senior leadership at your corporate event will show participants how serious your firm is about the event. As employees take cues from senior leaders, their involvement will make your event more credible and encourage your participants to engage more.
An important thing you should note is that leadership involvement doesn’t just mean showing up and observing the event. Senior leadership should be involved throughout the planning process of the event to ensure that your event aligns with the business goals and they must also take part in the activities. When you do this, everyone will buy-in to what you’re conveying through your event.
Allow Your Audience to Make Memories
Photo booths have become quite popular for corporate events these days. Photo booths are really fun and by including them at your event, you can provide participants with a personal souvenir of your event. If your participants are playful, provide some costume elements or props to up the wow factor.
Arrange a Competition or Game
Planning competitions, games or awards for your corporate event can make the event much more fun and engaging. For example, you can plan ‘scavenger hunt’ for all those who are attending your event. You can offer participants the chance of winning great prizes such as meal vouchers, tickets to a ski resort, etc. This way, the participants would love to take part in the scavenger part.
By creating fun and engaging competitions like scavenger hunt, you can engage your audience, enable interesting conversation and build stronger relationships.
Interact with Your Audience
Check in and see that all attendees are having a great time. Ask the participants of your event how they’re doing and gauge the venue to check that attendees are interested and comfortable and everything is running smoothly. If you wait, you won’t find out that your guests aren’t comfortable or the food or drinks aren’t being delivered on time, and then you won’t be able to do anything about these issues. If these types of problems aren’t addressed, they can distract participants from the overall purpose of your event and hinder their engagement. If your event is large, consider using voting technology or audience response, which can be accessed from cell phones of attendees to gather feedback from them in real time. When you check in frequently, you can troubleshoot issues before they affect your event and take the fun and engagement away from it.
Don’t Let Anything Unexpected Throw You Off-Track
You must know that extensive planning is required for successful corporate events that are fun and engaging. Even after every last detail has been planned and you think that there’s nothing more to do, ask yourself, “Has everything been taken care of?”
Consider the things that can go wrong at your corporate event and think about how you will overcome or prevent them if they occur. If you plan everything right, chances of anything going off-track are slim, but you must still be prepared. If you are prepared for the worst, you can resolve the problem, keep your event moving along without any glitches or distractions and keep everyone happy and engaged.
Include Experiential Learning
With experiential learning, you can help your audience learn about things in a more fun and active way. This will make your event worthwhile even after it is over. Experiential learning can mirror scenarios that are experienced by employees on the job, but these scenarios are masked with the help of story metaphors.
In experiential learning, real life experiences are incorporated which means that the skills your participants will gain through this kind of learning will be applicable on their job. This will make your event not only engaging, but productive as well. Moreover, experiential learning can be adapted to different group sizes, training needs and budgets, which mean that it can be used for different kinds of events.
Mix it Up
At a corporate event, it is normal for people to cluster into established groups. If the attendees just cluster into groups, they won’t engage and interact with others, making your corporate event dull. Mix things up by assigning attendees to different teams and organize some engaging and fun team building activities like decorating a cake. Allow the team to pitch their unique creations and let the participants vote on the best one. Offer a prize for the top position to make everyone participate in the activity.
Follow Up
After your event is over, reach out to your participants and thank them for taking the time out to attend your event and ask them to share their valuable feedback. Ask them about what should have been done differently and if there are any improvement required in learning sessions and engagement activities. Doing so will allow you to make the next corporate event even more fun and engaging than the previous one.
Planning a corporate event that is fun and engaging is certainly a difficult task, but by focusing on the strategies we have highlighted above, you can greatly improve the chances of your event being more fun and engaging. By incorporating the things we have enunciated, you can increase the engagement of your guests and make the event more appealing for them.
If you’re struggling to make your event fun and engaging and think that you cannot focus on all these things on your own, seek help from a professional event planner. At The Great Event, we have successfully planned fun and engaging corporate events for companies in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area. If you wish have the same level of quality Diamond Certified customer service delivered to you, contact us for organizing your next corporate event.
Image Credits
by kasto – yayimages.com