How to Maximize Attendee Learning, Motivation and Networking

What is Gamification? Why do I need it? Is it just some fancy geek buzz word for something that really won’t help my event?

Gamification – what’s in it for me?

The Webster dictionary definition of Gamification is:

“The process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation.”

Done well, gamification can increase engagement, motivation, information retention and overall networking and activity – all key performance indicators to any great group dynamic.

So how can we motivate our event attendees to do, feel and remember what we want them to at our meetings and events? Well, we all love having fun, right? So what you need to do is use that to steer your attendees in the right direction.

Quick recap: The typical cellphone user touches their phone 2.617 time each day. This smartphone addiction can pose a great challenge to our engagement, attention and productivity at meetings, event, conferences. But with the help of an event app, you can use the fact that your attendees are always fidgeting with their phones, to create better meetings and increase the ROI of your events.

Motivation through incentivization

In MeetApp’s Gamification feature, you can award points to your attendees based on what actions they take in the app. This gives you as an organizer an easy way to incentivize your attendees to take the actions that are most important to you. It also gives your participants an easy way to see how they’re performing in the Leaderboard, and what actions they can take to earn more points and win.

By awarding more points to certain actions, and less points to others, you can steer your participants to do what’s most important to reach the goal of your event. For instance, if you’re hosting a networking event, you might want to make sure that everyone creates a really great Participant profile and takes part in your networking challenge by posting a selfie with a new friend in the Activity Feed. If it’s a Change Management conference, you might want to award more points to Polls and Surveys.

Reinforce information for better retention

As a speaker, you only have about 7-8 minutes before audience distraction sets in. This means that instead of delivering a 30-60 minute monologue, resulting in very sleepy participants who probably won’t remember much of what you just said, you should find ways to activate your audience every 10 minutes or so—or in other words, gamifying your seminar! This is easy when you’re using an event app, just prepare a couple of polls and questions and have the participants answer in the app. Show the result in real-time on the big screen and open up for discussion. This makes for a much more fun session and helps your participants remember what’s been said to a much greater extent.

Increase networking and collaboration

To really maximize the effects of using gamification in your event app, pair it with a challenge or competition of some kind. Using the example of a networking event that I mentioned earlier, this could mean sending out a push notification to your audience, saying “Networking Challenge."

For the next hour, find someone you haven’t met with. Post a selfie with them on the Activity Feed along with a fun fact about them. This is worth 100 points!” By using gamification and awarding points for posting on the Activity Feed, you are incentivizing your attendees to perform the task.

And by posting this networking challenge, you are not only helping your attendees to interact with new people, in turn, they are also introducing new people to the rest of the audience. Win-win, right?