Your event content is dialed in, and your registration counts are meeting expectations. What else can you do to encourage participation? Gamification is an ideal tool to encouraging attendees to engage. Here are three tips to consider when searching for gamification technology.
1) Whats your End Game?
If you could wave a magic wand, every attendee will attend as many sessions as they can, visit every sponsor, and provide feedback on every experience. Not likely, but you can deploy incentive that encourages this behavior. Take your attendee behavior tracking data and apply points to participation, scoring activities that are most important to you higher, such as feedback.
2) Follow the Leader!
If you’ve participated in the NCAA 
Bracket competition and or Fantasy Football, you know that games can be fun and engaging. Create a similar experience for your event by presenting a leader board within your mobile app and even perhaps a large screen monitor in the expo hall. This can be a very effective means to get your attendee focused on your event content and sponsors. It works in that we’ve experienced attendees asking us if their evaluation was received so they earn their points!
3) Play by the Rules.
If your incentive is on target and attendees are truly excited to participate, they can also abuse the game. Good example, at a recent event that we serviced with self-session check-in, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Bernstein recognized the game prize and somehow managed to attend ALL sessions – including those happening concurrently. He filled out an evaluation for each session and appeared to have visited nearly every sponsor. Not a bad problem to have but controllable if your event staff and sponsors are aware of the incentive. Tell your sponsors to only capture meaningful conversations, and tell your speakers to encourage the audience to be genuine in their evaluation response. This will benefit sponsors and you as the event producer.
Validar is ideally suited to help you encourage the right attendee behavior with our EventScore application. Coupling this with vMeetings and our Content Measurement report, you will get the evaluation response rates you need to measure your event performance and content effectiveness. Contact us to learn more!
