Entertain You to Engage You
Entertaining your event’s participants not necessarily means making them happy while they have some fun time during the event. If they are only entertained and not engaged with your event’s content, you are missing great opportunity to achieve what you are aiming for when you decide to stage the business event
The common misinterpretation about peoples’ experience during events comes from the assumption that having good time during the event means having fun, being not bored. The confusion mainly derives from the fact that many examples of staged, delivered experiences during events are the examples from the entertainment industry (The Experience Economy; Pine & Gilmore, 2020). These examples although are interesting, memorable experiences not necessarily means attendees at your next business event need to be only entertained and have fun time. Instead, and particularly for the business events, entertainment often means being engaged with event’s content while enjoying the time spent at the conference, workshop, training or seminar.
What’s the difference ?
Entertainment is one of the four realms in the experience design concept (alongside with education, aesthetics and escapism). The audience entertains when passively absorb the content by seeing or listening as such being engaged with your event’s content. Therefore, being only entertained one could easily loose the focus on the event content and derail from the actual reason why he or she are present at the event which could range from active listening, gaining information, education, rising awareness, contribution toward building up very important work case or asking questions to steer the discussion and more.
How to Entertain and Engage your Audience ?
Try answering yourself the following questions:
1.) how you are going to deliver what you intend to and
2.) what participants should do in order you to achieve your business goals and they to feel their time was well spent.
When you respond to question 2.) continue answering the following two – what type of entertainment would help participants to enjoy the experience better at the event ? How to make their time more enjoyable so they can keep their mind focused on what is about to be said, seen and heard at the event ? Briefly, there are on-line and off-line tools and techniques to keep participants focused while they enjoy with the content. Quick tip: Slido offers good range of games and tools for having fun while being focused and engaged while Confiva offers full online platform for online and life meetings and business events with integrated gamification tools and more.
Sometimes, some events are simply not providing enough space for entertaining. They are about serious, specific topics. You are not comfortable to get out of the comfort zone of usual conference agenda. Attendees are not expecting this from you. Still, addressing entertainment through your event content not necessarily means derailing from the seriousness of the topic you are about to deliver. Addressing entertainment means you deliver event’s content in a way, that occupies attendees’ attention agreeably by them as such engaging them in memorable way with your event.
What you are doing to make participants enjoying while being engaged and focused at your business event ?