Engage Your Audience—and Keep Them Glued to Your Presenters—by Using These Easy Tools
How do you stop attendees from zoning out during your virtual events? Are you striving to educate without tipping into a boring lecture that has people hitting the virtual exit door? The attention span of the average adult is 10 minutes. After that, you start to lose them if you aren’t meeting their needs. Here are some great tips and tools to make sure you are keeping your virtual audience engaged and glued to your presenter.
With hard-won experience, our rule of thumb at Kennedy Events is to keep sessions no longer than 30 minutes, with at least half of that time dedicated to Q&A and/or frequent and consistent audience engagement throughout.
You’re probably asking, “What about my 60-minute deep dive into the amazing updates to our software we’re rolling out tomorrow?” Excellent question. Sessions can be longer if you are engaging with your audience throughout and tailoring content to meet the needs of your audience in real-time via engagement tools.
Here are three easy ways to engage your audience as well as a few ideas to help make them work:
1) Question & Answer
Next level virtual events call for something more than simply using a Q&A session as an afterthought if time permits. Adult attention spans are lousy in the best of times, and now that we’re on Zoom all day every day, it’s even worse. QUESTIONS ENGAGE THE BRAIN! You cannot ask a question without the brain automatically going to search mode and wanting to respond.
Break it up. To make Q&A better, try taking questions throughout the presentation. Divide a 30-minute presentation into seven minutes of talking followed by three minutes of answering questions. Don’t just toss out the phrase “put your questions in the chat bar and we’ll address them at the end!” Instead, weave in solicitations throughout the presentation.
“I’ve just shown you three ways to increase your advertising ROI. Which one would you like me to expand on? How can I help you better understand? Ask me now and I’m happy to answer!”
Have a plan. If there are no questions right away, don’t cut the session short. Have one or two things ready that you can expand on or offer.
Harness platform power. Consider choosing a platform that allows attendees to “upvote” the questions asked by other attendees so that questions are ranked based on popularity. A dynamic presenter can engage a staff facilitator to interject at specific moments.
“Jody, we have a popular question here about slide eight. Can you give another example of how to motivate employees remotely?”
Our team has endless ideas for audience engagement. Need help from the ground up? We’ve got you covered. Looking to polish a few of your in-house ideas? Our team knows what works and what’s best left out. Check out our virtual event management packages to see how we can help you elevate your virtual game.
2) Polling
Both polling and Q&As allow you to gather information from your audience in the moment and cater content to what they most want to hear. Most online platforms have a polling function that lets you poll the audience. Like Q&As, a poll lets you solicit info from your audience in a way that can serve one or more purposes:
Perk up your attendees by engaging their brains.
Quiz them on what they’ve learned. This is useful for training content; you can quickly test their recall of something. If it’s a point you really want to drive home, the one thing you most want them to take away from the day, this is an excellent way to quiz them, praise the people who get it right, dispel some myths or misconceptions, and restate your case.
Signal that you value attendee input and feedback. (You’ve gotta mean it though!)
Gauge whether you have their attention. Hint: If you have 500 people online, but only 25 people reply to your poll, you have a problem.
Gather real-time data from a group of clients or users. How about a session where you uncover some trends from among those assembled and then discuss what they may mean? Taken a step further, we’ve produced conferences where post-event blogs and white papers were issued breaking down survey results taken during the event.
Break up the energy. “What did you get done during the break? Touched base with a family member / Gave a pet some love / Snacked / Snoozed / Surfed the web / Took a quick walk / I’ll never tell.”
Looking for suggestions on the best polling tools? We would love to share our favorites. Give us a call and let’s talk!
3) AMAs (Ask Me Anything)
AMAs are an internet phenomenon popularized by Reddit, where a famous person would take written questions on anything that interests the audience. Think everything from “What’s your morning routine?” to “How did you get the idea for your first book?” In business settings, we’ve seen them work particularly well in casual afternoon sessions and sometimes even as panels on a specific topic. Here’s how to make them work in a virtual event:
By person. When you’ve got a person of stature, like your CEO or CMO, your keynote speaker, or an industry expert of renown, tap them not just for their “talk” but for an AMA.
By subject. When you’ve got a somewhat homogenous audience with similar interests (think a conference for digital marketers) and you want to demonstrate that you “get” their needs, offer an AMA with one or several subject matter experts.
Host it. Have one person act as a moderator/host. This person can emcee the session, welcome the audience, introduce the speaker, and read off the questions to the subject.
Moderate the questions. As with polls and Q&As, you’ll need staff to cull the chat in your online platform and feed the best, appropriate, and salient questions to the AMA host. Some platforms allow moderators to hide, delete, suppress, or “upvote” questions; all of which can be useful if you have a large or unpredictable audience.
Feed it. Have staff come up with at least five questions they’d like to hear answered. Be prepared to get those questions to the host. It helps if the host is also curious, compelling, and ready to ask their own questions of the subject.
Boil it down. Work with your host and subject in advance to get crisp and pointed answers. This keeps the session lively, and short and gets you quotable content you can use on social media.
Liven it up. Maybe everyone wants to know what Taylor Swift had for breakfast, but you probably aren’t lucky enough to have her as your AMA subject. You can still weave in offbeat questions to keep your audience engaged. Questions like, “What’s a recent piece of fiction you loved?”, “What’s your favorite business book?”, or “What’s your secret to unwinding after work?” will offer a bit of something extra for your audience.
Market it. AMAs are an offer of access to an expert most people don’t get to interact with every day. It’s a welcome break from the content people expect to be offered at a virtual conference and can help drive attendance.
Time it wisely. When you build your schedule, an AMA can be great after a break or near-the-end session for when you are worried about traction.
IN NEED OF SOME VIRTUAL EVENT EXPERTISE?
In the virtual world, Kennedy Events knows how to create agendas that pack a punch as well as content that grabs your audience’s attention and doesn't let go. Schedule some time with us today and learn how we can bring our expertise in the virtual realm to your next event—and keep your attendees in their seats.
PAIGE BUCK
Paige has been herding cats, err, masterminding details for more than 20 years, and been partner at KE since 2011. As a natural in front of and behind the scenes, she discovered her talent for coordinating large productions during her undergrad theatre days. Paige is an East-coast native, but made her mark on the Bay Area nonprofit and tech scene with her mad logistical and fundraising skills. Paige goes sailing on the SF bay every chance she gets, and especially loves when she can bring her pibble pup (the best word around for Pitbull mix). Kennedy Events is lucky to have Paige and her caffeinated smarts on the team!
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.
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