The Ultimate Learning Experience: How to turn event education into an engagement magnet and actually measure it!

We’ve talked about why and how events are using education as a strategy to anchor attendance, extend their reach, and generate new revenue—all without stretching their team or budget.

We've also discussed why solutions like live-streaming, conventional recording, and standalone audio transcription summaries fall short of acheiving those outcomes and completely miss the opportunity to create and measure real attendee engagement during and after your event.

Attendee learning expectations have far surpassed the days to just sit and listen while they handwrite notes and take pictures of the big screen. If that sounds familiar your event education experience might be stuck in the Stone Age.

Events are using the playbook below to turn their education experience into a measurable engagement magnet to create FOMO, boost NPS, and increase value. They're delivering a year-round learning journey to engage their audience before, during, and after their events—all while measuring success along the way.

Pre-event:

When attendees co-create sessions, return attendance jumps by 68%. (Source: Event Leadership Institute/Bizzabo, 2024)

Education engagement starts well before the event. Attendees review your program to plan their schedule. Compelling session titles and descriptions with recognizable speaker names help draw attention.

Session Chat opens the lines of communication between the audience and the presenter well before the event. Attendees will post, comment, and ask questions to set expectations of what they want to learn and achieve from your sessions. The preemptive feedback helps speakers tailor their presentations to deliver promised value. A session chat "lit up like a Christmas tree" facilitates engagement that creates audience buzz and FOMO you can promote to capture last minute on the fence registrations.

What to measure: Session schedule selection is a good indicator if you’ll need overflow or a bigger room. But now you can pair that with real engagement before the event even starts to validate you’re headed in the right direction.

On-site:

Sessions with real-time engagement tools increase dwell time by 39%. (Source: Freeman Trends Report, 2024)

Connecting your audience to event-engage interactive learning tools is easy. It helps encourage attendees to download your event mobile app or they can scan a QR code.

Broadcast the session content to the digital devices of your in-person audience for a unique second-screen learning experience. This allows attendees to see the big screen visuals right in the palm of their hands.

Interactive Note-taking allows attendees to highlight, annotate, favorite and take notes directly on the content. The AI note-taker will catch anything that they miss.

Live Multilingual AI Captioning makes sessions inclusive so hearing impaired, international, and all attendees can follow along and never miss a note, especially during panels.

Live Reactions captures audience emotions at specific moments that resonate with attendees. This gives speakers real-time feedback but also allows attendees to favorite and time stamp specific content they’d like to easily revisit in their post-session review.

Q&A crowdsources audience questions with the ability to upvote for increased topic exposure. Speakers and moderators know which questions are most important to answer first. This doesn't require any training or screen switching. Any questions that can’t be answered live on the spot can be addressed post-session through the presenter admin to keep the conversation going.

Sponsorship revenue generation opportunities showcase sponsors with their brand moment to get noticed during sessions and remembered post-event.

What to measure: Session attendance tracking is a good indicator of marketing success. But now you’ll be able to measure participation, attention, and real engagement to determine content success.

Post-event:

User-generated content boosts post-event engagement by 50%+ and sponsors love the organic reach. (Source: HubSpot + Splash, 2024).

Recordings immediately sync session audio + visuals + the attendee’s notes so that each attendee has their own personalized recording segmented into chapters. The momentum of onsite engagement is carried over post-event without any delay. Downloadable MP4 files of the recordings are only available for organizers.

AI transcription summarizes the audio with the visuals and time stamps the recording into segmented chapters that make it easy to search and efficiently find value without having to sit through the entire recording.

Handouts are generated from the live presentation visual recordings including the transcription summaries along with the attendees’ personalized notes to download and share. This makes it so you don't have to worry about collecting and loading the handouts from your presenters. Again, downloadable MP4 files of the recordings are only available for organizers.

What to measure: Session ratings and surveys measure multiple variables that determine the lows and highs of attendee satisfaction. Net Promoter Scores measure how likely an attendee is to return and promote your event to others. Session recording views measure post-event engagement while the sales of the recordings measure revenue. All of these measurements need to be taken into account. But, now you’ll be able to measure content engagement to know what to program, repurpose, and promote that actually impacts attendee ROI to gain and retain more attendees.

Measuring Success:

Emotionally connected attendees are 2.5x more likely to register again for your next event. (Source: Freeman Data Pulse, 2024).

Speaker performance analytics are delivered through the presenter admin for speakers to see their audience engagement of the content to know what segments resonated best.

Sponsored session performance analytics are a value add that measures audience engagement to identify who was interested specifically in what content for post-session "lead" follow up.

Program performance analytics measure content engagement to identify your highest performing topics, segments, and sessions.

How are you measuring programming success? Read the article: Why Your Session Success Metrics Aren’t Telling the Whole Story and What Actually Matters

Year-round engagement:

Transition engagement from event-engage to your LMS for continued learning. Interactive recordings facilitate immediate post-event engagement in event-engage for 30-60 days. MP4 recordings are available for organizers to repurpose, monetize, and load into their year-round learning systems so that engagement transitions from onsite, to immediately post-event, to year-round.

Repurpose content for marketing now that you know exactly what to program and promote. Content performance analytics tell you the exact clips to use in social and email marketing that encourage your audience to watch or purchase full length recordings year-round in your LMS and to attend your next event in-person.

Putting it all together:

Instead of trying to "Frankenstein" several solutions together, click the button below to see how event-engage delivers a comprehensive learning experience that wows your audience to keep coming back year after year.