Retention Events: The Most Effective Strategies to Engage Adult Learners

Plan Better EventsSmart Event TipsVirtual Events

Jun 22

Adults come to your event with high expectations, an existing knowledge base, and fixed ideas about what does and does not work. When creating learning and retention events, it’s imperative that your event sessions inspire attendees, change their mindsets, and drive performance. While there are multiple methodologies to make this happen, creating an effective learning experience for adult learners can often feel like taking a shot in the dark.

While children learn from their surroundings without being choosy, adults learn in a more selective manner. They tend to capitalize on what they already know and build on it. Half the battle of creating a successful learning event that inspires value realization and product adoption is overcoming the hurdle of reaching busy, stressed minds who place a high value on their time—and not wasting it. To build the best content, there are four key components to create an event focused on a learning experience.

Hold Attention

The importance of managing the attention of learners effectively cannot be undervalued. Design learning events that capitalize on the way brain science actually works.

Keep your adult learners single-mindedly focused on one thing at a time. The first and foremost step in any learning process is to gain the learner's attention. Multi-tasking is a misconception. This is because the cerebral cortex in the brain can focus on only one thing at a time. When the mind shifts from one thing to the other very quickly, the effectiveness of both is lost.
Create multiple modes in which the learner can interact with a new concept using enriched environments. You increase the number of opportunities for new information to connect to your adult learner’s prior experience when you include elements such as vivid imagery, music, charts, stories, short lecture sprints, and breakout rooms for discussion between peers. When you provide elements that connect with your attendees, the content you’re presenting is more likely to stick.

Create Self-Directed Learning Opportunities

A key component of adult learning is self-directed learning. Adult learners want to control what they know, and to an extent, how they learn. According to educator and adult learning expert Eduard C. Lindeman, adults are motivated to learn as they experience the needs and interests that learning will satisfy. Experience is the richest source to acquire new information.

An adult’s orientation to learning is “doing.” They find relevance in task-oriented learning, which they can align with their workplace realities; include exercises in your learning format that allow for problem-solving and unveil perspectives that create “aha” moments. This will give your learners the confidence to conquer their own challenges with this newly-acquired knowledge.

This could look like using real-world examples to demonstrate your solution to problems they face regularly so that your solution is immediately applicable to their pain points.

Inspire Emotional Investment

Emotion and memory are interlinked. Human beings are more swayed by emotions than by a bunch of hard facts and cold statistics. Learning events should spark the desired emotion from the get-go. Our favorite stories keep us hooked because they tug at our heartstrings and we emotionally invest in the outcome.

How to drive engagement with emotionally charged learning:

Create emotionally-driven content that captures attention, maintains interest, and moves the learner to take action.
Find the pain point your learner is experiencing, then use that emotion to craft powerful learning content.
Present content as a story.

The beginning should focus on the audience’s baseline reality and focus on the real-life problems they are grappling with. Offer solutions with concise information.
The middle should contrast today’s reality and tomorrow’s desired future. These contrasts hold an audience’s attention when they experience a small dilemma and then learn its resolution.
Finally, the end should leave your learners with a concrete sense of resolution and clear outcomes that will be achieved once their learnings are applied.

Spaced Repetition

Improve long-term retention using the spaced retention method. According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, we tend to forget almost 50-80 percent of all new information we have learned within a few days after the learning event has occurred. However, we tend to recall more and forget less when the learning is spaced across time and repeated during the teaching session.

Design learning programs that space the reiteration of content delivered to the learners. When you distribute the learning into spaced stages, it ensures long-term memory, making the learning effective and more impactful.

Are You Prioritizing Product Adoption and Adult Learning?

There’s no better way to invest in your customers and grow your retention revenue than learning events. Our expert planners work with you to create a high-caliber learning experience that will deliver an event with an impact that continues well after it ends. Schedule some time with us today! We’ll guide you through tactics to create a transformative and impactful experience structured to drive adult learning and value realization.

MAGGIE KENNEDY

Maggie Kennedy is the co-owner of Kennedy Events is a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.