Adding games to your event is an excellent added engagement tool. Games can include quizzes and treasure or scavenger hunts.
Gamification incentivises your event attendees and makes them an active part of your event, meeting or conference.
You can use games to encourage exploration of a venue, promote key exhibitor stands, meet new people, break the ice by forming teams, or set tasks to encourage learning. Games create an extra level of appeal to your event by breaking up the day and adding another must-do part to the day. And it doesn’t hurt if you add prizes to appeal to those who love winning things.
Setting clear aims for a game at your event will help ensure that your game has a purpose that meets your event goals and that game players benefit from it.
Gamification at your event
Our clients have used a scavenger hunt game to encourage guests to visit particular stands at an exhibition. For example, a leading food distributor uses the game to ensure that attendees travel across the entire venue and see at least one exhibitor from various sectors. By snapping a visible QR code at each exhibitor stand, the attendee collected stamps on their card until it was full and they were entered into the prize draw. A fastest time leaderboard was used in the example below to add a secondary prize element.
Exhibitors win by seeing more traffic while event attendees have fun collecting their location stamps and winning a prize.
Gamification in practice at your event
Having a game as part of your event will increase engagement with exhibitors, improve communication between attendees and also give opportunities for social media posts by all parties. Games create a fun atmosphere and bring individuals together. Scavenger hunt competitors can be tasked to travel to different parts of a venue and collect QR codes in an app, visit a stand and trigger a proximity alert with their smart tracking device, or even take a photo of an object.
Benefits of gamifying your event:
- Create a memorable experience for guests
- Increase usage of your event app
- Increase event engagement by all including exhibitors, speakers, and guests
- Scavenger hunt – incentivise attendees to visit certain exhibitors, attend speaker or workshop sessions and connect with sponsors to help drive traffic to those all-important areas.
- Increase in social postings from exhibitors, attendees and opportunities for you to create a buzz around your event. Use a hashtag to encourage all attendees and exhibitors to join in.
- Surveys and Quizzes in your event app can also test knowledge of the content your speakers provide in their seminars.
- Boost peer-to-peer networking – attendees use our smart tracking devices to encourage attendees to click their wearable devices together to exchange contact details. Every connection earns points to take them to the top of the leader board and you can find your most influential attendees.
A great prize makes the day!
Consider how your prize will motivate those joining in. You’ll need to make sure the prize relates to your audience and equally is a fair match for the amount of effort they might have to put in. You will need to consider the prize and how it relates to your event and audience. Is it worth them competing for? Does the competition for it achieve your event goals? Will they want to talk about the prize before, during and after the event?
Follow up emails and blog posts can name the winners and ensure that attendees continue to talk about your event after it finishes.
In our experience, gamification will motivate attendees to participate, encourages interaction between all parties at the event, and will help you as the event organiser to meet some of your event goals.
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