Is Your Event Education Experience Stuck in the Stone Age?

If there's been one constant in events the past couple of years, it’s change. Expectations are evolving so fast it’s tough to run tomorrow’s playbook before it goes out of date.

Smart organizers like you know that if you stand still, you get left behind, especially when budgets tighten during times of uncertainty.

In most cases, education is one of the top reasons to attend your event. It’s a powerful lever you can use to attract and retain attendees. Additionally, it can be used to extend your audience reach and revenue. However, attendees have more options than ever to easily access similar competing education online and at other events.

You probably focus on session programming to set your event apart. But, it doesn’t differentiate your attendee learning experience from the competition.

On the other hand, if your attendance and retention are solid, you might not feel the need to make a change. However, if you’ve seen your attendees taking pictures of the big screen during sessions, it’s the easiest way to tell it’s time for an upgrade.

Chances are there’s several other components of your session experience that might also be stuck in the Stone Age. Here’s how you can easily upgrade it without breaking the bank:

Accessibility and Inclusion

Stone Age: Events have a wide range of attendee demographics and needs to accommodate. ADA compliance is typically covered by the venue, except when it comes to hearing assistance. Hiring interpreters is expensive and they can’t be everywhere at once so hearing accessibility typically takes a back seat along with language translation support for international attendees. However, in most cases the acoustics in combination with speaker accents and pronunciation can make it tough for any attendee to follow along without missing something.

Upgrade: Multilingual live closed captioning can be broadcast directly to your attendees’ digital device at a fraction of the cost. Captions have also become a popular and helpful way to add valuable context and engage all attendees (we all know someone who watches their Netflix with subtitles).

Notes

Stone Age: High-value sessions often move quickly, making it tough for attendees to keep up with handwritten notes. This is typically where you see them taking photos of the big screen to fill in the gaps later, even when handouts and recordings are available because they don’t have a way to interact and engage with the content during sessions.

Upgrade: AI note takers can transcribe audio and visual content to ensure nothing is missed and makes it easy for attendees to search and revisit key takeaways after the event. You can also broadcast the session content live to your attendees’ digital devices for interactive notetaking to create a unique second-screen learning experience that boosts engagement during sessions.

Q&A

Stone Age: Typical Q&A involves waiting until the last few minutes of your sessions to pass around a microphone for the audience to ask questions. You’re limiting engagement between your speakers and audience to that short period of time and decreasing overall engagement.

Upgrade: Engage attendees throughout the entire length of the session with live polling, audience reactions, and crowd sourced questions. Typically, this can be facilitated through your event app or by quickly scanning a QR code for easy access.

Handouts

Stone Age: The logistics of sourcing, managing, and uploading presentation handouts for attendees to access can be a nightmare. Not to mention, they’re static content that attendees can’t interact with.

Upgrade: By recording and broadcasting the session content directly to your attendees’ digital devices, you don’t need to process handouts. This experience can automatically create a handout from the live content that includes their personalized notes for easy and immediate access.

Live-Streaming/Recordings

Stone Age: You may have tried recording your sessions in the past, but high costs and low engagement can make it tough to justify your content investment. Relying on cameras and techs can be expensive. The process and delivery of the recordings has a big impact on attendee value and engagement. You see this with the live-streaming model going out of date. It requires justifying a ton of additional work and costs to deliver two experiences at once that creates a competing alternative against in-person attendance.

Upgrade: Recordings are a great way to extend the life and reach of your education content. They can add attendee value, revenue, and create FOMO. However, you must maximize your session recording value and engagement to justify the investment. Software can make recording economically feasible. It can also broadcast the content to engage attendees during sessions while AI transcription can help increase post event engagement.

Measuring Success

Stone Age: Evaluating program performance using only surveys, session ratings, and attendance tracking. None of these provide an accurate assessment of how your attendees interact and engage with your education content.

Upgrade: Interactive learning tools can measure tangible attendee engagement to know what content actually connects with your audience. These metrics can identify your highest performing sessions, topics, and segments so you know exactly what to program and promote to get more attendees and keep them coming back.

Ask yourself these questions: What happens if you don’t upgrade your education experience? Does everyone still show up no matter what?

If your education experience could use an upgrade, check out our playbook: The Ultimate Learning Experience: How to turn event education into an engagement magnet and actually measure it!