Your Audience is Drowning, and Your PowerPoints Aren't Life Jackets

Picture it. A convention center ballroom. The late twenty-teens. 

2,500 people have been in the audience since 7:30 a.m. with back-to-back presentations. Some ran just a few minutes long--but those minutes added up and the schedule is now off. 

It's lunch time. However, next on the agenda is a 45 minute health care panel. 

The audience is struggling. Much like the lettuce in the buffet they weren't getting to eat--they are visibly wilting.

Think fast, hot-shot. What do you do?

This is the time when you need to shift the agenda. That panel might need to turn into a workshop. That panel might need to be moved to after lunch. That panel might need to be turned into a series of "insight" videos that play through the rest of the event. There are lots of options--all of which require some fast thinking and agenda adjustment (not unknown at even the most well-planned event). 

What should not have happened did. They decided to plow through anyway. Get it over with.

The panel, predictably, also ran long. The content wasn't irrelevant--it was interesting and critical--and the audience was just not able to absorb it. At that point, it would have been better to not do the panel at all. I'd say the effect was the same, but the extra content was lost AND it sapped even more of the audience's energy and willpower. Instead of getting a rescue, a drowning audience was pulled under. 

So how do you throw out a life line to a drowning audience?

• Watch your audience. What's going on in their heads is just as important (and more so) than the technical smoothness of what's going on onstage. 

• Adjust as needed. Agendas are living things at live events. If your audience is drowning--send the lifeboat early if you need to.

• Incorporate physical activity. If you need to plow on, have the audience stand up, shake hands, greet each other, share an insight, etc.

• Incorporate interaction. Make a passive audience active participants through gamification and other strategies.

• Plan ahead. If your agenda is jam-packed, consider that you're not optimizing your time by getting the most content in--you're overstuffing your audience. 

Lackluster Lunch & Learn?

 

Ahh, the lunch & learn. Free food in exchange for a participant's attention and buy-in. What's not to love?

A lot. 

Audiences are savvy; they know what a lunch & learn tends to be--a thinly-veiled pitch trying to sell them on something in exchange for some pizza and their valuable time. It's no surprise, then, that audiences don't come into a lunch & learn with the most open of minds. In fact, many come in thinking, defensively, "You're not going to sell ME."

This, unsurprisingly, does not make them receptive to your information. They exist on the spectrum of indifference to active resistance. 

However, you can break down this defensiveness almost immediately and turn a skeptical or bored audience into raving fans--and it's as easy as incorporating a game show. 

Why Game Shows?

1. Competition: Structuring the event as a competition engages the audience's sense of play and activates their desire to show off their knowledge (and win!). 

2. Interaction: This leads to the lunch and learn being an active experience instead of a passive experience. Not only are participants interacting with the presenter, but they're also engaging with their peers as teammates, discussing answers, and becoming involved with the content.

3. Message Reinforcement: This direct interaction leads to content and message reinforcement. The game questions are a content review, and they can lead to deeper level of curiosity and understanding. Audience members pay closer attention to the content when they know it will help them (win the game) later on. 

4. Emotional Experience (i.e. FUN): Game shows are a break from talking AT people; giving them an energetic experience that engages their emotions (emotional engagement also correlates with greater content retention). Aside from being extremely effective, they're also a lot of FUN. 

When to Use a Game Show in Your Lunch and Learn?

1. Beginning: Playing a game round before the presentation begins both generates curiosity around the topic and sets the tone: This isn't going to be the normal lunch & learn--it's going to be an experience that audiences will enjoy. 

2. Throughout: Playing rounds throughout the event boosts energy and keeps it high even when the lunchtime lethargy hits. 

3. The End: Closing out your presentation with a game round leaves your audience with a positive impression--and that translates to more than just a good time, it's a feeling of goodwill about YOUR company and/or product. 

When our clients started using game shows as part of their lunch and learns--it wasn't hard to get attendees in the seats, staying in the seats, and staying engaged throughout. Using game shows is definitely more than food for thought. 

Is Your Event Stressing Your Attendees Out?

 An event can be stressful for attendees. You’re taking them out of their natural work environment, they’re missing the cadence of their regular communication, you’re pummeling them with information back-to-back over hours (often delivered in a deadly-dry way), and they’re told that this information is mission-critical for their jobs and livelihoods over the next year. Sometimes there are unpleasant truths on their minds that never are addressed, and they’re expected to carry on and learn new information.

No wonder we hear from attendees, “I felt like I HAD to have a drink at the end of the day.”

This is, understandably, a toxic environment for learning. You can’t absorb new information when you’re stressed out about your environment, or when you’re fixating on issues. This is why we emphasize making events less stressful through multiple techniques. 

1. Address issues up front. When we use AniMates, addressing the elephant-in-the-room issues allows presenters to acknowledge that something is on an audience’s mind so they’re receptive to subsequent information.

2. Incorporate play. Gamification and team competition allow attendees to practice with information in new ways—but that are fun and engaging. Giving them an opportunity to move around, cheer, show off their skills and knowledge relieves the stress of information overload and ALSO helps reinforce content. 

3. Give attendees time to absorb information. Events are an investment, so it makes sense that a lot of clients want to squeeze as much information as humanly possible into the agenda—you have attendees there, why not use every second? However, without giving attendees the ability to reflect on the material in some way—reviews, creating personal take-aways, gamification, etc., they reach information overload and everything washes over them. 

We normally think of events as a time to reconnect, to motivate, to get on-board with a consistent company message. We don’t generally think of them as stressful, but those stress points in design are exactly what can inhibit the learning objectives of the event. With a little modification, events can become environments that are conducive to learning and lightning rods for shared ideas—instead of places attendees feel glad to escape at the end of the day.