Time is short and capacities for attendance are even shorter. We don the attendee’s hat to understand what the crux is for their attendance and participation.
Over the past two years, event planning has come with its own interesting set of challenges. While ensuring an event can successfully go ahead is the first step, the next hurdle is to understand how to engage attendees as we battle for their attention in a world filled with distractions.
We’ve seen and experienced it numerous times during the pandemic – running an event is one thing but getting people to attend is an entirely different conversation. Hesitation around in-person experiences as the Covid-19 pandemic has progressed is understandable, so many event organisers and marketers have opted to use the power of digital as a platform. However, based on stats compiled by Vimeo, attrition and drop-off rates at virtual events are between 30-50% depending on the type of webinar, which means you can expect anywhere from a third to half of your registrants not to make it to your event.
Focus crisis
In his book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, Johann Hari argues that stress and exhaustion are a killer for attention spans.
“Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. Other scientists say the evidence is strong and these anxieties are like the early warnings about the obesity epidemic or the climate crisis in the 1970s. I think that given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence. We have to act based on a reasonable assessment of risk,” says Johann in an excerpt, highlighting that there is a pressing need for us to conquer our ability to pay attention.
“I believe we need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get,” he explains.
What this means for us as planners and organisers is that we need to work harder than ever to create an environment in which our attendees are comfortable and relaxed, and where we can have their full and undivided focus. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated anxiety levels and if Johann is right, this will not have assisted anyone’s concentration span.
What planners can do
Ultimately, it is up to each individual to decide for themselves on the level of interaction and engagement they are most comfortable with. Some attendees enjoy being vocal and actively contributing to the dialogue, while others prefer to be on the periphery observing discussions as they take notes throughout sessions. Although somewhat different, the common denominator is that both attendees are highly engaged – one enough to participate, and the other to keep up with the conversation and document this to perhaps produce their own report and refer to at a later stage.
Understanding what the drawcard is for these types of delegates’ respective participation will help planners when it comes to structuring a marketing campaign to encourage potential attendees to register for their event. Due to the nature of each event, these reasons may be vast in how they vary but it is also where being able to define our target audience becomes critically important.
Return on time invested
Time is a precious and irreplaceable resource that, once spent, is impossible to reclaim. This underscores how our calls to action need to provide a strong case for anyone who attends our events that there will be a distinct return on time invested (ROTI).
“Time, whether spent or borrowed, is a valuable commodity; it can therefore be frustrating for team members if they feel the time they spend on their retrospectives could be better directed elsewhere – especially when retrospectives are a core practice of agile methodology! Rating a meeting’s ROTI gives each team member a platform to offer their opinion on the value of the meeting and present ways to improve it,” says a recent Team Retro article around team meetings specifically.
For event planners, a positive return on the time their delegates invested might be one of the following:
- They learnt something new that they may not have learnt anywhere else.
- They made a valuable connection that led to a business conversion.
- They thoroughly enjoyed an element of your event – speakers/food/gifts/entertainment, etc.
One of the more challenging aspects of ROTI is that it is largely sentiment-based, so developing post-event surveys and questionnaires can provide more accurate insights into how successful your audience engagement was.
This is a truncated version of the original article that ran in the January/February 2022 edition of Meetings magazine. To read the full article, click here.
