6 Apps for Event Engagement

Just last week, we had a great meeting with our Association Event Advisory Board where my colleague Helena Lehman and I asked our group to discuss ways to capitalize on two mega trends affecting meetings: Increasingly shorter attention spans, and audience control. During the discussion she and I shared some new technology and applications we’ve been exploring for changing and improving meetings. Here are a few that sparked interest from our group:

Event Apps. Attendees are using their mobile devices in your meeting whether you want them to or not. Enable them to use them in ways that enhance your meeting. You might already have an app that has an agenda scheduler, a map, social options, and more. But if not, some easy entry options include:

• Guidebook, which has a bunch of free core features and a build-it-yourself guide, lets you easily create a mobile guide for your event.
• Crowd Compass has a lot of detailed content containers for single events, multi-events, trade shows, and it even integrates gaming with your meeting.

Content Delivery. You have speakers. They have presentation materials. You have IMAG. Even without these items, your participants are looking at a screen - the big one you’ve put up or the one they brought with them. Put it to work for you.

• Nice Meeting gives participants a look at the speaker’s materials on their tablets and gives them the ability to take notes on each slide and save pdfs while chatting with other participants and interacting with polls.
• Join Speaker puts control in the speaker’s hands by allowing them to receive questions and comments from the audience or poll the group in the real-time.

Better Networking Opportunities. How do you help participants make connections at your event? Airlines are doing it and so is Ticketmaster. Events should be a natural way for people to connect via common interests or business objectives.

• Connect your participants on Vivastream to allow them to opt-into sharing their social streams to meet other like-minded participants and give event planners a boost of social data.
• Make use of Social Tables to draw floor plans, seat participants, and quickly check attendees in at registration.

How are you using new apps and technology to drive engagement in your meetings? Have you used any of these listed or have others that have worked well for you? If you want suggestions on solution apps for other meeting challenges, let us know. We’d love to talk! Contact us via the form below or at 1-800-SPEAKER.