Is Your Event Education Experience Stuck in the Stone Age?

If there's been one constant in events, it’s change.

Attendee expectations are evolving so fast that if you stand still, you get left behind. And when it comes to learning they have several options to easily access similar education online and at other events.

Most organizers focus on session programming to set their event apart. But, it doesn’t differentiate your attendee learning experience from the competition so they choose your event instead.

If you've seen your attendees taking pictures of the big screen during sessions, it's likely that your attendee learning experience is stuck in the Stone Age.

Here’s how you can easily future proof it to exceed expectations and attract the next generation without breaking the bank:

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 pictures of the big screen to fill in the gaps later. It happens even when handouts and recordings are available because they don’t have a way to interact and engage with the content during sessions.

Future Proof: AI note takers can transcribe audio and visual content to ensure nothing is missed and make 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.

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.

Future Proof: Multilingual live 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).

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. Or you submit your questions into the "moderator abyss" of an audience response system, never to be seen again. Either way, you’re limiting engagement between your speakers and audience to that short period of time and decreasing overall engagement.

Future Proof: Engage attendees throughout the entire length of the session with live polling, audience reactions, and crowd sourced questions without having to rely on a moderator to approve. 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 resources that attendees can’t interact with.

Future Proof: 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 personalized handout from the live content that includes the attendees notes, the visuals, and AI summary for easy and immediate access.

Recordings

Stone Age: Your attendees can't be in every session at once. So you may have tried recording your sessions in the past, but high costs and low engagement can make it tough to justify the 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 live-streaming phasing out. 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.

Future Proof: 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 recording engagement.

Measuring Success

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

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

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

If your education experience could use an update, check out our playbook: