Levelling Up Your Events with Event Gamification
As the world continues beyond a global pandemic, there is a renewed sense of excitement and anticipation for in-person events and conferences. This return to in-person events offers a unique opportunity for individuals to network, connect, and learn; something that many have been missing out on for several years in some cases. With excitement being at an all-time high, event organizers must think beyond traditional formats to truly make these events unforgettable. One way to achieve this is to embrace the power of event gamification. By incorporating engaging interactive gameplay elements into live events, event organizers can create engaging and immersive experiences that are sure to stay at the forefront of attendees’ minds.
Understanding Event Gamification
Event gamification can best be explained as integrating game mechanics, elements, and opportunities into live events and conferences. By using interactive challenges, leaderboards, and rewards to encourage and enhance attendee engagement and participation, gamification allows event organizers to transform passive attendees into active participants. This in turn makes the event experience more enjoyable, and memorable.
The Purpose of Event Gamification
The main goal of event gamification is to enhance your attendee engagement, thus creating memorable experiences. By gamifying elements of your event, you can capture your attendee’s attention, motivate active participation, and encourage additional human connections amongst your attendees.
With gamification, you can encourage your attendees to explore different aspects of your events, such as engaging with exhibitors and sponsors. This added layer of excitement, competition, and achievement, ultimately makes your events more interactive, rewarding, and memorable for the attendee and more valuable for the sponsors.
Measuring the Success of Event Gamification
You need to be able to quantify the success of your event gamification components, to best understand what is and is not working. Some examples of things you can measure include:
Attendee Engagement:
Measure the overall level of attendee interaction, participation, and overall engagement with gamified activities and challenges.
Exhibitor/Sponsor Engagement:
For most event organizers, Exhibitors and Sponsors make up a large amount of income for events. Ensuring your Exhibitors and sponsor see tangible ROI (return on investment) will entice them to rebook for your future events. Being able to determine how much gamification drives attendee engagement with your Exhibitors and Sponsors, such as booth visits, interactions, and lead capture, is worth its weight in gold.
Survey Responses:
Event surveys provide event organizers with invaluable feedback and insights from attendees. Seeing a tangible increase in survey participation will help you to better understand how your events are performing, and where you can improve.
Session/Activity Attendance:
Sessions are the lifeblood of most events, and usually one of the major reasons attendees will attend. Being able to track the impact of gamification on session and activity attendance rates will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your gamified elements in attracting and retaining attendees.
Examples of Event Gamification
Leaderboards:
Most people are competitive by nature, so why not take advantage of this to spice up your events? Display leaderboards to showcase top performers and foster healthy competition.
Interactive Quizzes:
Your attendees typically sit in a large amount of educational content at events; test their attention and knowledge by incorporating quizzes related to event content or exhibitor offerings. Award badges or rewards for correct answers, and optionally even use this to validate for CE Credits. This can also motivate attendees to stay present in sessions, rather than glancing at emails or working.
Scavenger Hunts:
What’s more fun and exciting than a scavenger hunt? – Watching a bunch of adults run around and participate in the scavenger hunt! Create a scavenger hunt, where attendees collect points by finding hidden QR codes, visiting specific exhibitor booths, attending sessions, or completing tasks.
Social Media Engagement:
Social media allows attendees to share fun memories at your events, and helps drive a sense of community. Encourage your attendees to post pictures and videos, and comment on posts from other attendees, to help drive a sense of community and engagement. Additionally, with EventStream, our private social wall, you don’t have to worry about monitoring external social media platforms and can automate the points awarded for posts.
Gamified Networking:
Networking is king at events, and by using gamified features like virtual business card exchanges, or interactive challenges within networking platforms, you can encourage networking.
Other Event Gamification Ideas:
Don’t be afraid to get creative with your event gamification ideas, as sometimes certain components can be spun in a new exciting way. For example, you may set up a gamification goal called “Meet our CEO”, where you must scan a QR code that is being held by the CEO of your organization. This encourages attendees to seek out the CEO, drives networking and gets people out of their comfort zone, by introducing a fun way to interact with a key stakeholder.
Event gamification enhances attendee engagement in multiple ways
Increased Motivation:
As an attendee, it is easy to get stuck in the rut of an event, moving from session to session to listen to the content and then checking out at the end of the day. Gamification of your events adds motivation to actively participate, explore, and complete challenges. This new level of engagement adds a nice break to the “staleness” of some events.
Social Interaction:
Humans are social creatures at their core, so gamified activities promote and encourage new connections and collaboration among your attendees. This fosters a sense of community, and belonging, and opens new networking opportunities.
Knowledge Retention:
Adding gamification components to your event can improve information retention and understanding of event content, thus increasing the overall educational benefits.
Fun and Enjoyment:
With gamification you can create additional entertainment and enjoyment for your attendees, making their event experience more engaging and memorable.
What are some of the benefits of event gamification?
Enhanced Attendee Experience:
Gamification transforms events into interactive and immersive experiences, leaving a lasting positive impression on attendees.
Increased Attendee Engagement:
Gamification motivates attendees to actively participate, explore, and interact with event content, exhibitors, and sponsors.
Greater Value for Exhibitors and Sponsors:
Gamification drives attendee engagement with exhibitors and sponsors, resulting in increased lead generation and meaningful interactions.
Data and Insights:
Gamification provides valuable data on attendee preferences, behaviors, and engagement levels, enabling organizers to make informed decisions and improve future events.
Strengthened Community and Networking:
Gamification fosters a sense of community and collaboration among attendees, creating networking opportunities and lasting professional relationships.
Reimagine your event experience with gamification
With in-person events and conferences coming back, in full force and stronger than ever, this is the perfect opportunity for organizers to reimagine the attendee experience. By truly embracing and utilizing event gamification, organizers can create dynamic, immersive experiences that captivate attendees, foster meaningful connections, and ultimately drive tangible results. With EventsAir as a leading events management platform offering gamification at its core, organizers can effortlessly utilize the power of gamification to maximize attendee engagement, exhibitor/sponsor value, and create memorable and successful events, with WOW! factor. So be sure to fully integrate gamification in your next events, to leave a lasting impression on your attendees.
