Interactivity in events: is it the ultimate solution to your (their) needs?
Rosa Garriga
Dear Event professionals,
This is my first contribution in EIN. I’m really excited about this opportunity to help move forward the events industry by sharing with you news and ideas.
I hope you’ll find my articles informative, useful and above all, enjoyable!
In this article I’d like to address the challenge of reaching the appropriate level of interactivity with delegates in conferences. For the past few months I’ve been learning a great deal about how to improve the experience of attendees to an event. Academic authors such as Pine & Gilmore (Experience Economy, 1999) claim that the more active is the role of the person, the better his/her learning experience will be.
Event technology suppliers have created really efficient voting systems to further engage with the audience. Open Space sessions are increasingly being introduced in conferences’ programmes (which are really fun and productive, by the way). Generation Yers (those born between 1981 and 2000) do not like to be passively listening to a long one-way presentation, they want to participate and even co-create the event.
Having experienced myself all of this, I’m very positive about the benefits of introducing interactivity in events. I believe that in many cases, it can draw the line between a basal and a memorable experience.
It can help to gather useful information from the public through opinion polls.
It could even lead to a major breakthrough thanks to a brainstorming session where people from diverse backgrounds come together.
It sounds like a ‘must’ for your next event, doesn’t it?
However, last week I began to question myself to what extent interactivity makes an event more successful. I attended a conference called Lift, in France, dedicated to the social implications of new technologies and famous for being a co-created event. This means that its attendees choose some sessions through an online voting system set up many weeks before the event, and they themselves can make presentations and showcase their projects. Thus, my expectations for the conference sessions were really high.
In the end though, it turned out that all the presentations were ‘only’ a speaker and some fancy Power Point slides. The level of interactivity was close to zero. The organisers did encourage people to make questions by sending SMS or Twitter messages. However, the sessions were running late all the time, so only about 3 or 4 questions were answered during more than 20 presentations.
I couldn’t stop wondering, why is the speaker the only one talking? Yet, Lifters (that’s how attendees like to be called, they’re such a strong community!) seemed to enjoy the sessions, and the feedback about the conference was mainly positive. And by the way, many of them are Generation Yers. Oops.
In my quest for understanding this, I started thinking: is it because Lifters are from a different race? Does this happen in other events? What characteristics do they have in common? The answer is that they don’t go because it is part of their job description, because it looks good on their CV or even to network (many of them didn’t even bring business cards with them).
They just go because they want to be part of the Lift community. In other words, their motivations are intrinsic, as opposed to extrinsic. They are genuinely interested in the topic, and if the content is good enough and the ideas are well-presented, they don’t need anything else.
So, when designing your next event, don’t try to introduce doses of interactivity just for the sake of it. Think first about who is your target market, what are their needs and motivations to come to your event, look at the options available and then decide what is more suitable.
Taking the time to know your clientele is important not only for event marketers, but also (and even more) for event designers.
By Rosa Garriga – EIN Contributor
Category: Event Industry News, Event Technology
About the Author (Author Profile)
Rosa Garriga is an experienced international events professional with experience in a diverse range of conferences and events in both the public and private sectors. Rosa is currently working as Operational Events Supervisor at the Imperial College in London, and finishing a master’s degree in Event Management. Her special interest lies within meeting design, the application of new technologies to improve the interactivity in meetings, and the implementation of CSR’s triple bottom line principles. She is also passionate about languages, an avid reader and traveller and has a keen interest on social media and the Internet.’Subscribe
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Rosa:
As an event professional, I get what you are saying. I write a lot about information vs. education and hands-on-interactivity. And everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve been met with resistance that some audiences don’t want to engage or get involved.
It’s been my experience that those audiences are used to coal and don’t realize that they could have diamonds. This is the perfect illustration of where speaker presentations are crowdsourced and I submit to you it becomes a popularity contest. Not a situation of which session could we learn from.
I’m a beliver in crowdsourcing content and topics, not speakers and presentations. Then as the event planner, picking speakers that can provide both some information and a lot of engagement. That’s the hands down winner IMO.
Jeff,
First of all, I’m honoured you’ve taken the time to leave your comment here, I usually read your blog and consider you a thought leader.
Second, thanks for pointing that out and for your advice. Actually, after this article was published I realized that I was missing the bigger picture, yes Lifters were satisfied but would have they been more if the sessions had been different? I still clearly need to learn a lot! However I guess my point is that anything that you introduce should be aligned with your objectives and suitable to the audience you want to reach, which now sounds pretty straightforward but in reality it doesn’t always happen.
Finally, in Lift France actually only the topics are crowdsourced, the speakers are chosen by the organisers. Unless in the case of when the participants make their own presentations, but they’re all young entrepreneurs very unknown to the mainstream.
Best regards,
Rosa
Thanks for the thought provoking post, Rosa.
Big fan of Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy. Shocked at how few meeting professionals are familiar with their work, which has profound implications for the industry. It’s actually on my night stand, once again, as I’m wrestling with a particular client’s challenge right now. There’s also lots of research on the superiority of experiential learning (over more conventional methods) from the training industry which pre-dates EE. In the meetings industry, I particularly admire the work of Doug Bolger of http://www.iLearn2.com/
But the question of how much interactivity is too much misses the point for me. If more interactivity is better than less, and the vast majority of meeting presentations use one-way communication formats, I question the need to compromise, especially because there are so many more interactive than ‘static’ formats to choose from. The anemic pace of change in the industry is another argument not yielding.
I believe interactivity is a business imperative…not just a ‘must’ have. But there’s two sides to interactivity, formal – as in presentations and informal – as in hallway conversations, etc. I suspect conferences like Lift succeed despite the lack of formal interactivity because of the community-level interactivity. This goes to show just how powerful these informal learning opportunities are. They are a true differentiator.
Bottom line: meeting professionals should be more aggressive when it comes to incorporating formal interactivity (of all kinds). But the real return is on the informal side and that’s too often left to chance at meetings and events. There’s a lot more upside here and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
Thanks for your comment, John!
I regularly read your articles and follow the Perfect meeting’s forum on Linkedin
Basically, I thoroughly agree with everything you’ve said.
Regarding Pine&Gilmore’s, it’s actually the book we’ve been more encouraged to read during my master’s degree in events management.
I didn’t know about Doug Bolger’s work though, I’ll have a look at the website, thanks!
Very interesting the distinction you make between formal and informal interactivity. I also think that presentations should be more interactive, as I said in my previous comment, Lifters were satisfied but probably they could have been more if the format had been different.
Every time I see more meeting planners talking about this topic, which makes me think that there’s some interest from our side. One problem may be the facts that meeting owners are reluctant to introduce changes, and/or that only seek our advice when it comes to choosing a venue or destination. What do you think?
And about the informal interactivity, actually I’ve just published an editorial here in this magazine titled ‘How to maximise the value of your events by boosting the number of interactions’. However, I’m sure it’s like a beginner’s guide for you!
Finally, I’d love to know, do you measure the ROI of these informal interactions at all? How do you do it?
Best regards,
Rosa