While adoption of event mobile apps has grown at meetings and conferences, getting attendees to use the apps is still a challenge. While a mobile-event app can’t replace the most effective type of engagement at an event – face-to-face engagement – it can help to optimize it. Plus, apps typically monitor and measure the interaction, which can be a powerful benefit for annual events.
Automate Classic Engagement Activities
- Q & A Sessions: Take, for example, the question and answer sessions that are common in conference presentations. Some audience members have to scramble to a stationary microphone. Others have to wait for someone to run to them with a wireless unit. The running back and forth eats up precious time. While attendees wait, they go for Facebook or to check their emails. With mobile apps that allow attendees to enter a question that is sent immediately to the speaker or waits in a queue until the speaker is able to answer it, audience members can ask more questions—even if they’re shy.
- Live Polling: Finding out what an audience is thinking or getting answers to specific questions from a large group is difficult. However, Polling apps allow attendees to answer polls using their mobile devices. By incorporating a polling app into the event app, answers can be tabulated in real-time, helping to sustain the momentum of the presentation. The responses appear immediately on a display screen at the front of the room during the event and give planners the ability to pull reports of the poll responses afterward.
- Mobile Matchmaking: In-event conversations between participants—attendee to attendee or between attendees and exhibitors—are pretty much the whole point of a meeting. That said, it’s not always easy for conference-goers to find others who share their interests or exhibitors that are a good fit. Mobile matchmaking apps eliminate the guesswork around who to engage with. They use attendee and exhibitor profiles and matching algorithms to suggest matches.
- Games: Some planners find that they have meeting objectives, like getting a certain demographic to engage or breaking the ice for newcomers, that gamification can address. Over the past few years, mobile conference directory apps have begun incorporating game features. The scavenger hunt game asks participant to complete tasks in exchange for points or other rewards. Passport-style games make attendees go from booth to booth in a trade show racking up points that later can be exchanged for prizes.
To learn more about how mobile apps can be used to automate engagement activities and raise mobile app use at your next show, please click here to request a consultation.
