Creating and organizing engaging events are much harder than they seem. The act of “engaging” is, in itself, a phenomenon that involves various factors If we dig deep into the notion of engaging we can say it includes three different aspects.
Main Aspects of Event Engagement
1. The first is “cognitive” showing how much you are actually focused on what is being presented.
2. The second is “emotional” which looks at how the audience enthusiastically connects with your content.
3. Lastly, the third is “behavioral” which looks at the actions you (the viewer) take as a result of your engagement. Analyzing how much your attendees are stimulated in these three areas a great and clever way to examine how engaging (and successful) your event is.
Aside from these three basic factors that can easily help deduct the level of engagement of certain events, there are many other aspects that contribute to the overall engagement and interaction a company can have with his clients, customers, and attendees. We must first mention the importance of technology. The new high-tech devices of our modern world and the various technological advances being made definitely stimulate interaction in the event business. Thanks to new technology, the engagement in events is boosting with the help of live polls, virtual mics and presentations, digital artistic representations, etc. In a way, these new machines and high-tech devices form a powerful network that interconnects content and events with attendees and clients through digital and virtual influences.
Technology is not the “Be All”
Technology alone is definitely not enough to plan an engaging event as it is more characterized as an “add-on”, something that will boost and event’s engagement (but not create it). The time, place, guests and theme of your event are all things to pay attention to. It’s important to logically correlate each aspect of your event in order to have it be as successful and engaging as it can be.
For instance, planning an indoors event about a great and innovative household heating device in the middle of summer with an older target audience/attendee is quite foolish. However, planning an outdoors event on a hot summer’s day about perhaps a household cooling device is very clever. It’s important to take into account the time and space of your event and how this works together. This requires a good amount of marketing skills as well since you need to be able to guess what people will want to hear about, when, how and where!
Lastly, the most important yet forgotten aspect of engaging events is the actual content. Sometimes, we are so caught up in fixing everything that surrounds our content such as our location, which guests are attending, what performers will sing and when the event will take place that we forget about the root of the event which is the content. If your content is not good, the rest doesn’t really matter. It’s important that you as a creator and organizer find your own content interesting and worth hearing about or else no one else will. Content is really the glue that holds your whole event together making it the most crucial part of it. For this very reason, it needs to be impeccable!
