Tech tools that BOOST ENGAGEMENT

The benefits of promoting engagement at business events range from making the event more enjoyable and the content more memorable for your attendees, to building a sense of community and gaining useful insights and feedback from participants.

With these benefits in mind, we asked Mike Lysko, founder and CEO of Flock Eventing Platform, which engagement tools he would recommend for South African business event organisers. Here are his top picks:

• Sli.do is pretty much the standard tool when it comes to live polls and Q&A sessions. It’s easyto-use, has robust analytics and is reasonably priced. It gives event organisers the chance for their attendees to ask questions and engage in content that is being presented.

• Kahoot is great for quizzes, testing general knowledge and doing team building. Users have to answer questions within a time-limit and a leader board is displayed to keep track of who is winning - and encourage some friendly competitiveness.

• Flock event apps are awesome for communicating to your audience, and getting their feedback back. Each app can easily host multiple third-party applications (such as the other engagement tools I’ve mentioned here) to provide a better event experience. They also support peer-to-peer networking, with attendee profiles and contact information, which is another critical type of event engagement.

• LoQuiz lets you easily set up a variety of games and quizzes with an integrated question library. It can also help you stage bespoke treasure hunts, using photos or written clues to guide players. The app, which an appointed team leader operates on a tablet, uses GPS for outdoor positioning and a special clue system for indoor question mapping, making it suitable for events of all sizes.

Aside from the benefits that come from promoting engagement, these tools also offer useful analytics, adds Mike, explaining, “These tools provide real-time insights from the audience –through the feedback from the live polls and even sentiment from the words typed into the tools, not to mention the response rate (essentially how engaged your attendees are) and the type of content that attendees engaged with the most. All of which helps event organisers plan better for their next events.”

A final reminder is that – even if you’ve got the best engagement ones in the world –engagement tools won’t be effective unless your attendees use them. Therefore, Mike recommends the following, “Communicate the tool ahead of time, let attendees know the benefits and incentivise them for using the tools with giveaways and prizes. Ask MCs and speakers to have some of their content make use of the tools.” For example, speakers can incorporate polling questions into their presentation.

For some ideas on what polling questions to ask, visit the ‘Resources & Tools’ tab on theplannerguru.co.za and search for ‘poll’. You’ll find a free handy download of suggestions, courtesy of Flock.