There is an art to leveraging gamification as a means to encourage, recognize and reward extraordinary engagement from your event attendees. Our EventScore and vSpace game is focused on recognizing three attendee activities, attending sessions, engaging with exhibitors, and providing feedback on content. Validar has learned a ton from some of the smartest brands in the world, how to effectively market this investment. Here are four tips we’ve learned that will ensure you get the most out of your gamification investment.
Keep your community in mind when gifting
Some brands shy away from gamification as they feel their community may find the incentive gimmicky. If your community will not respond well to the incentive then don’t do it and think of recognition that will resonate. We find charitable giving to be broadly accepted.
Make sure your attendees and exhibitors know about the investment you’re making
Gamification can be an effective tool to increase sponsorship revenue, especially if you get ahead of the event and effectively market your gamification investment. Before the event starts, make sure your attendees know the recognition and rewards they can earn through engagement. If marketed well, Exhibitors will appreciate your investment in their sponsorship, and in many cases pay more for participating. A good indicator that your incentive is resonating is if attendees are actively seeking points earned, a real-time view of their activity, or perhaps ways to abuse the game. We’ve seen some crazy examples of this happening!
Get your content team involved
Speakers can help tremendously in driving engagement. Leverage them! Before they kick off their session, have them promote the investment, and again when wrapping up. We have seen some excellent examples of brands gamifying session evaluations as a means to drive meetings during the event. Speakers love this solution, as it allows attendees to “opt-in” to meet with them versus waiting in line post session to get questions answered.
Use gamification to encourage engagement for extended events
One thing the pandemic taught us in the value of event content, especially if it is recorded, hosted and gated. Many brands extend their event by granting access to this content digitally. If this is what you’re considering and or doing, use gamification as a means to recognize and reward attendees that come back to your platform to consume content, provide feedback and engage with exhibitor content digital booths.
Validar takes great pride in our engagement and loyalty program tools. If you’re interested in learning more or simply want to brainstorm, let us know here.
