4 Ways to Increase The Interactivity of Your Virtual Events

Your last virtual event wasn't the success you were expecting because your participants became bored? This is indeed the risk with the increased number of virtual events! Staying hours behind a screen listening to a speaker can make time seem very long... But don't panic, there are different ways to add a touch of life to your virtual event. Eventdrive has compiled the 4 best options to make your virtual event as interactive as possible.

How to make your virtual event interactive?

There are different ways to bring a little touch of interactivity to your event, without going to extremes. To help you, we drew up a list of the best techniques to use to stimulate your future event project and make your participants feel happy!

1. Encourage Discussions

As we know, the risk when organizing a virtual event is to lose contact between the participants or with the speaker. In order to make your event interactive and not lose this essential touch, it is therefore crucial that you offer your guests the opportunity to communicate.

First, you need to introduce your speech in an engaging way to capture the attention of your audience.Second, the best way to achieve this is to provide an online chat. This allows participants to interact with each other or react to a presentation. Even remotely, each participant can easily take the stage to interact with the speaker. It can also be an opportunity to share a point of view or even an expertise on a specific topic! A live stream chat allows you to create dynamic interactions between participants. But it is also the best way to facilitate remote networking.

Also, think about providing a question and answer moment at the end of your presentation. Your participants can then express themselves freely as they would in a face-to-face meeting. This can be done via the live chat or Q&A feature that you can moderate if you have a lot of people connected, or by using webcams for a smaller audience. The important thing is simply to inform your listeners that there will be a dedicated time before the end of the event for them to express themselves.

2. Use Video Transitions

Imagine this situation: you are about to attend a 2-hour conference from your home office, from behind your computer screen. 120 long minutes listening to an expert speak on a subject you are passionate about, but all alone at home.

Participants at your events probably feel the same way! That's why it's imperative to bring a touch of energy to your virtual events. One of the best ways to do this is to add video transitions.

Rather than letting your speakers talk non-stop throughout the presentation, encourage them to insert videos. Not only will this diversify the content of their presentation, but it will also make the session more dynamic and engage your audience. With Eventdrive Live, you can add pre-recorded videos easily within the platform and launch them at the click of a button.

A Hubspot study showed that nearly 85% of consumers want to see more branded video content. So offering some during your event seems to have only positive points!

3. Create Interactive Votes & Quizzes

Another way to capture the attention of your audience: quizzes. You can choose to use an external application like Menti, but with Eventdrive's integrated solution, you’ll be much more efficient!

By launching votes and quizzes for your participants via Eventdrive, it is possible to save all the results to analyze later. Also, it is very easy to create different types of questions depending on your objective.

4. Gather Thoughts Via Word Clouds

The use of word clouds is the best way to break the ice at the beginning of a conference. For example, you can ask your audience how they feel today. Your guests will just have to answer directly via Eventdrive and the word cloud will dynamically change in real-time as you go along. To make the event interactive from start to finish, you can also provide a word cloud before you close a session by asking your attendees to summarize their experience in one word.

The word cloud is a very fun and easy to use tool that can bring a hint of interactivity to your virtual event. They are not necessarily suitable for an in-depth analysis of how your participants feel, but can break down the virtual wall that exists at virtual events.

Don't forget to moderate your events

By making your events interactive, you will find a new way to capture your audience’s attention. It's also ideal to make everything a little more dynamic.

Be careful though, interactivity does not mean that everything is allowed. The goal is not to turn your event into a big mess!

By using Eventdrive, you keep the control over the different interactive tools you want to activate. Our platform allows you to manage everything from a single location.

Whether you use the Q&A tool, the Live Chat or Word Clouds, all the content is managed in one place. You can set rules to facilitate the moderation of this content for added peace of mind. This way, you make sure that participants are respectful.

At a time when virtual events are increasingly popular with businesses, it is essential to find ways to renew yourself and continue to capture the attention of your audience. Depending on the objectives of your event and especially the target audience you are addressing, different options are available to add that necessary touch of interactivity. On the other hand, be careful not to make any mistakes! The objective is not to make your event interactive at all costs, but to bring the necessary dose of interactivity to keep your participants engaged.