According to a Markletic Survey of more than 3800 event marketing leaders, audience engagement continues to be the greatest challenge when hosting digital events, with the next largest challenge focused on audience interaction. Moving beyond static presentation and webinar formats to engage audience members in the conversation is essential in maintaining attention to program content, successful message conveyance, and ultimately the success of the event.
To combat the challenge of audience fatigue and inattention, the healthXchange has partnered with leading virtual event platform Hopin, together with Kahoot!, to drive engagement through the integration of interactive questions, polls, white boards, and text and video chat, to ensure participants remain engaged in presentations through a wide variety of mediums.
As standard, the healthXchange works with panelists and moderators to incorporate a minimum of three interactive touchpoints into each 45-minute presentation, and up to five interaction opportunities into 60-minute sessions.
LIVE Q&A
From attending many in-person meetings, we all know how important the question and answer period is during any panel or discussion, enabling participants to dig deeper into the stories of panelists, receive clarification on technical points, or to share their own perspectives and experiences. This can be challenging in a digital environment, especially where sessions are pre-recorded. As such, the healthXchange live streams all presentations, giving participants and presenters the opportunity to interact directly throughout presentations. To enhance the experience, participants are provided with multiple methods of sharing questions and perspectives, including the chat function, or requesting to come on-stage, where they can share their video and audio when asking questions and sharing perspectives.
POLLS & QUIZZES
Although Q&A is certainly an integral part of any presentation, it’s important that sessions incorporate additional touchpoints for interaction with the audience, to maintain attention throughout the session. Polls or quizzes offer an excellent opportunity for feedback and connection, giving facilitators an opportunity to learn more about the audience, steering and crafting the message to make the greatest impact. Using the Kahoot! application, discussion leaders can also ask a series of questions with defined ‘correct’ answers, creating a leaderboard or winner of the quiz – an ideal opportunity for a swag give away, further increasing brand awareness and connections.
WORD CLOUD
Another option for interaction which is particularly useful at the start of a session is to encourage the audience to participate in a word cloud exercise, where they are able to share a one or two word message in answer to a prompt, which is then visualized on screen, with repeated words or phrases emphasized in the image. Helping to set the tone and mindset for participants, while also giving the presenters a feel for the audience, this option is also available through our Kahoot! integration.
WHITEBOARD
Finally, for sessions with a more informal structure, such as breakout sessions, leaders can elect to engage the audience through a whiteboard exercise, where audience members can directly add comments to the whiteboard, or have their comments added and ranked through using vote-up and chat functions.
EXECUTION
Many presenters (and even organizers) can understandably shy away from using additional pieces of technology which can invariably go wrong, missing out on valuable opportunities to engage with participants. To meet our aim of seamless execution, we are happy to remove any friction by setting up interactive features ahead of presentations, as well as launching the various engagement pieces at the pre-arranged times, or via presenter cue.
SUMMARY
Interacting with your audience will make your presentation more memorable and more fun, for both you and the audience, so let’s work together to add interactive features throughout the session.