Imagine you’ve planned a large corporate event, selected the perfect keynote speaker, hired and managed all of the necessary vendors, and put countless hours into painstakingly ensuring the event is flawless. Then, the first session of the day rolls around, and the speaker asks their opening question. The response? Crickets. What we’ve just described is every event planner's worst nightmare – working tirelessly to bring an event to life only for it to fall flat when it comes to audience engagement.
The level of audience engagement can be a significant indicator of the event's overall effectiveness, as well as providing an understanding of how attendees are experiencing the content. However, it can be a bit complicated to track if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Keeping an eye on engagement and participation can be key to a successful event – one where speakers aren’t met with a room full of awkward silence.
Quick Links:
- How Do You Measure Event Success?
- Why Audience Engagement Matters
- Nine Key Audience Engagement Metrics
- How to Use Your Audience Engagement Data
- Keep Your Audience Engaged With Bishop-McCann
How Do You Measure Event Success?
Corporate events, franchise conferences, and incentive travel programs all have a wide array of goals. You might be interested in building connections between teams, increasing attendance rates, or boosting ROI. But, a crucial indicator of event success is connecting the event theme and content back to attendees in a meaningful and relevant way.
We often see event organizers measure event success by audience engagement and participation. However, audience participation isn’t always black and white. What does it mean, exactly, for an audience to be engaged? What does that look like? How can you measure it?
Let’s circle back to event goals for a moment. Event organizers want to ensure that guests are walking away from events having connected with the event’s purpose, whether that’s showing appreciation, boosting motivation, or increasing connections among guests. Oftentimes, the success of these goals can be tied back to engagement.
If attendees are helping each other during workshops, nominating peers for awards, or simply responding to a question in a live poll, then the data associated with these factors should indicate how much attendees participated. And, high participation is closely related to event success.
Why Audience Engagement Matters
Audience engagement lies at the heart of any successful event. After all, a considerable number of decisions in the planning phase are influenced by attendee preferences. Placing importance on audience engagement helps keep attendees involved throughout the event, ensuring they aren’t just passive spectators but active participants who feel connected to the experience.
Audience engagement goes beyond merely filling seats; it's about creating meaningful interactions and connections that leave a lasting impression on attendees. In today's digitally-driven world where attention spans are short and distractions are seemingly everywhere, engaging your audience is more critical than ever.
When it comes to event experiences, engagement plays a starring role. If attendees feel actively involved and invested in the session or activity, they’re more likely to enjoy themselves. Plus, they’ll be more inclined to interact with other people present, deepening connections with peers and even fostering new relationships through networking opportunities.
On a similar note, audience engagement fosters a sense of community and belonging among attendees. Events provide valuable opportunities for people to connect, share ideas, and build relationships. By facilitating interactions and networking, especially at employee recognition events, you can create a supportive and collaborative environment where attendees feel valued and connected to each other and to the organization they’re a part of.
In addition, engaged audiences are more likely to retain information and messaging delivered during the event. Whether it's a product launch, a conference keynote, or a workshop, actively involving attendees in the session ensures they absorb and internalize the information being shared.
Once the conference or event is over, these people are more likely to translate their experiences into their work once returning to the office. So, teams who are engaged and can strengthen their working relationships with one another will also work more effectively together, creating a more productive work environment.
The importance of audience engagement stretches beyond the attendees themselves. From a strategic standpoint, audience engagement can also yield tangible benefits for event organizers. Engaged attendees are more likely to spread the word about the business hosting the event, share their experiences on social media, and recommend the brand to others. This kind of positive word-of-mouth and social media buzz can significantly extend the reach and impact of the brand, in turn giving a boost to the brand’s reputation.
That said, maintaining engagement throughout the event requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. Event organizers need to pay attention to attendee feedback, participation levels, and energy levels to identify any areas that may need improvement or adjustment. This also requires flexibility and responsiveness in order to keep the audience engaged and ensure they have a positive experience from start to finish
Nine Key Audience Engagement Metrics
To truly understand audience engagement, there are several ways to measure participation. Not all of these KPIs will be relevant to every event, but here are some to consider when evaluating audience engagement.
Attendance Rate
How many people showed up to your event? If you had 500 people register, but only 200 checked in to the session, that’s a 40% attendance rate. How does this impact the content that you had planned? What should be changed next time to boost attendance rates? This could provide insights into how successful your marketing efforts were as well as what can be improved to help get more people through the doors.
Question Submission Rates
Let’s say your event has a Q&A session with a keynote speaker. A good way to measure engagement here is by keeping track of how many questions were submitted. A high number of submissions would indicate high levels of engagement.
However, it’s also important to note who is submitting the question. If there are only a handful of attendees submitting questions (but there are dozens or even hundreds of members in the audience) then the data might be a little bit skewed. Additionally, too many responses might mean that audience members are confused and are looking for clarification on the topic of discussion.
Feedback Responses
Perhaps one of the simplest ways to measure audience engagement is through post-event surveys. These forms ask attendees to provide some insight into their experience and do a great job of helping event planners create better experiences down the line. What they have to say can reveal a lot about their engagement and participation levels, as can the number of responses received to the survey itself.
Audience Participation
For sessions where audience members sit and listen, it can be difficult to track engagement. Fortunately, there are a few ways to add content and activities that promote participation. For example, live polling or games on mobile devices can get everyone in the room to contribute to the discussion by answering questions tied to the topic. The results then become part of the presentation.
To ensure you are getting the most engagement, check that you have a high number of people taking part in these activities. When you conduct a live poll and notice that the number of participants is low, you might need to rethink the content being used. Are the questions too complicated? Are you giving attendees enough time to provide a response? Are the questions engaging? The right poll or game can increase excitement and engagement when executed in the right way.
Session Attendance
Much like the attendance rate for the overall event, session attendance can provide insights into engagement. For instance, you might find that some sessions had higher attendance rates than others. Maybe the speaker or activity is more aligned with audience preferences, which promotes more interaction and engagement from audience members.
For virtual or hybrid events, it’ll also be beneficial to monitor session watch time. A virtual session that has audience members watching all the way through will indicate strong engagement levels, while a session with audience members exiting out of the live stream or video before it’s over tells us that the content likely didn’t resonate with them.
Event App Engagement
The beauty of event technology is that it does a great job of providing event organizers with the data they need to enhance experiences for attendees. Mobile event apps have reporting features that track engagement metrics and provide a detailed report that planners can then use to reflect on what went well and make improvements for future events.
High event app usage could indicate high overall engagement, especially if your event is consistently using apps to deliver information. On the other hand, if a high number of attendees is turning to chatbot features, contact information, or FAQs, they might be trying to seek help. This could mean that additional communication or clarification is needed.
Social Media Mentions
Social media is a great way for audience members to engage with events while simultaneously boosting online conversations around the brand or organization hosting the event. So, if you create a clever hashtag or have a dedicated social media profile, try encouraging attendees to post with that tag or tag that account. Keeping track of these data points will give some insight into how engaged attendees are.
Ethical Facial Analysis
Sometimes, audience engagement isn’t always effectively measured by what individuals are saying. In fact, a lot can be learned through emotions and facial expressions. With new event technology that uses AI and cameras, event organizers can learn more about their audiences using facial analysis.
Tools like Zenus use facial analysis to provide insights into the overall sentiment of attendees or audience members. The data can tell event planners a bit more about how attendees are feeling during an event without requiring them to do anything. This, in turn, creates a positive experience for attendees and gives organizers useful information to help them gauge the success of the event, sessions, presentations, or speakers.
Immersion Neuroscience
Recent data tells us that there are about 224.31 million people worldwide using smartwatches. Chances are most event attendees are wearing smartwatches too. These wearable devices track heart and brain data that can be useful for event planners when it comes to engaging attendees.
Immersion neuroscience leverages the hardware that attendees already use on a daily basis to track and predict the actions of individuals during social interactions, such as corporate events or incentive travel programs. You simply choose an experience that you want to measure engagement on, and using their smartwatches, you can “passively measure the extent their brain values the experience in real-time.” Like facial analysis software, the beauty here is that attendees never have to lift a finger for organizers to understand their level of engagement.
How to Use Your Audience Engagement Data
You’ve kept a close eye on your audience and you’ve studied their behaviors. Now, what do you do with all the data?
This information is key when it comes to planning successful and engaging events. In fact, many attendees want elements of personalization, and the best way to include those features is by getting to know the guests. So, with this data, event planners can ensure that sessions, activities, workshops, and speakers all resonate with what audience members want from events.
Keep Your Audience Engaged With Bishop-McCann
To help ensure your attendees stay engaged during the event, it’s always helpful to turn to expert event planners who can ensure that everything you have planned aligns with your audience, and Bishop-McCann is the perfect team for just that. To learn more about increasing audience engagement and making the most out of event technology, reach out to us today!
