How to Engage Your Audience for a More Interactive Event
Have you ever sat in the audience at an event or meeting where the speaker really knows their information, but you can’t seem to pay attention? Sometimes speakers will share excellent content, but forget to engage with their audience. When the audience isn’t engaged, the presentation quickly becomes dull and they will stop paying attention.
When hosting an event, not only is it important to pick a great speaker, you also need to have a plan for audience engagement throughout the presentation. Here are a few tips to keep your audience engaged during your next event:
Polling questions: Polling your audience is a common way to engage with your audience at an event. This could be as simple as asking a yes or no question, having the audience raise their hands, or asking a multiple choice question. Engaging with your audience through polling allows you to gain real-time insights to utilize during your talk.
Movement: When you sit still for too long, the human brain naturally loses focus. Physical activity stimulates and releases endorphins to help your body and brain stay energized. Incorporating a stretch break or movement into your event will help your audience re-engage.
Break Out Sessions: Build breakout sessions into your event. This will break up the larger audience and allow for smaller groups to do an exercise on one of the main talking points from the presentation. You can even appoint a leader of each small group to share the group's findings.
Music and Videos: Adding music or videos to your event will help break up all the talking. It will stimulate emotion in the audience and give their minds another thing to focus on. This is best done by adding throughout and is a great way to transition between topics.
Live Interaction: Don’t forget to interact with your audience directly. This can be done in a multitude of ways. You can host a Q&A session, do live demonstrations with the audience, or even just ask the audience to raise their hands to answer a question. This is an easily overlooked way to interact with your audience when pulling together an event.
Collect Feedback: The best way to know how engaged your audience was during your event is to collect feedback from them at the end. This will help you in future events to know what you did well, and what you can improve on.
If you don’t engage with your audience, their attention will start to wander. It is important to keep in mind that during your event, there needs to be more than just talking. There are many ways to keep your audience engaged. Find the strategies that work for you and implement them at your next event.
Are you ready to engage your audience at your next event? Contact the Research Forest Conference Center and talk with our events team today.
