"Engagement" is one of the vaguest words in events. Post-event reports fill up with app opens and minutes spent in the app, which mostly measure attention to a phone. An attendee can open the app twenty times to check which room they're in and never take part in anything.
A more useful definition is about behaviour. Engagement is attendees doing things that make the event better for themselves and for the people around them: asking a question, answering a poll, joining a roundtable, booking a meeting and turning up to it, coming back next year. Each of those is a decision someone made. This guide covers what organizers can change to make more of those decisions happen, and how to tell whether it worked.
Decide which actions matter
Before choosing tactics, write down the two or three actions that would tell you the event worked for attendees. For a conference built around content, that might be questions asked in sessions and seats taken at roundtables. For a trade fair, it is more likely to be meetings held at exhibitor booths.
This sounds obvious, but it changes decisions. If accepted meetings are what matter, a push notification that gets 400 people to open the app and read "Lunch is served" is noise. If roundtable seats matter, the roundtable list belongs in the morning announcement, not three screens deep in the agenda.
Some numbers look like engagement and usually aren't:
- App downloads. They count an intention to look.
- Total app opens. Wayfinding and boredom both produce them.
- Notification taps. Mostly a measure of how many notifications you sent.
- Minutes in the app. A long visit can just mean someone couldn't find the room.
Before the event
Most engagement is set up in the weeks before the doors open.
- Tell people what will happen. If questions in sessions will come from the app, say so in the pre-event emails. If meeting requests open on a set date, give the date.
- Keep onboarding short and useful. A few questions about interests and goals give matchmaking something to work with. A long form loses people before they have seen anything.
- Open sign-ups for limited formats early. Workshops and roundtables with a seat limit and a waitlist give people a reason to look at the agenda before they travel.
- Brief speakers and moderators. It is easy to skip, and it decides whether in-session tools get used at all.
Getting people into the app in the first place is covered in our guide to getting attendees to use your event app.
Engagement in sessions
Q&A that isn't dominated by a few
The roaming microphone follows a familiar pattern. The first hands up get the microphone, and at least one of them makes a statement instead of asking a question. By then, time has run out for everyone else. The people with the most useful questions are often the least likely to stand up in front of 300 peers.
Questions submitted in the app and upvoted by the room fix most of that. Anyone can ask without standing up, and the room decides which questions matter. A few habits make it work:
- Open Q&A at the start of the session, not the end. Questions arrive while the talk is fresh. The moderator mentions it in the first minute.
- Protect the time. A talk scheduled with five minutes of Q&A at the end will lose them. Ten minutes, guarded by the moderator, is more honest.
- Use moderation. Approving questions before they appear keeps duplicates and sales pitches off the screen. In Conecta, organizers can switch on approval so nothing shows until someone has checked it.
- Don't only read the top three. Upvotes tend to bunch around one theme. A moderator who also picks a well-phrased question with fewer votes stops one group from setting the whole discussion.
- Never fall back to raised hands. If the moderator ignores the app and points at the floor, the room learns the app doesn't matter, and the next session gets no questions at all.
Polls that inform
A poll is worth running when the answer changes what happens next. "Where are you joining from?" fills a minute. "Which of these is your biggest problem this year?" gives a panel something to argue about, and gives you material for next year's programme.
- Run one early. A poll in the first five minutes gets phones out and makes Q&A more likely later.
- Make the speaker use the result. If the answers appear on screen and nobody comments, the room learns that polls are decoration.
- Keep it to one or two per session. Five polls in a 40-minute talk is a quiz.
- Keep the results. When the same problem tops polls in several sessions, it is a good candidate for next year's roundtables.
The engagement features page lists what is available in sessions and between them.
Roundtables
Some people will never ask a question in a room of 300 but will talk freely at a table of eight. Roundtables give them that table. Cap the seats and open a waitlist when a topic fills. Choose hosts who ask rather than present. A group chat that stays open afterwards lets the conversation run past the time slot. Our comparison of networking formats covers when roundtables work and when they don't.
Engagement between sessions
Networking blocks, not just breaks
A 20-minute coffee break goes on the queue and the inbox. If you want meetings to happen, give them named time in the agenda, such as an hour in the afternoon with nothing big on the main stage, and set meeting hours to match. People treat a block on the printed agenda as part of the day. They treat a break as time off.
Matchmaking that gives people a next step
Recommendations matter most in the minutes before a networking block, when people have time and a reason to look. Each suggested person should come with a reason, such as shared interests or compatible goals, so deciding whether to send a request takes seconds. A short announcement before each block, pointing people to their recommendations and open slots, is one of the cheapest things you can do for meeting numbers.
The social wall
A moderated wall with topic channels gives people somewhere to continue a session's discussion or ask who else is heading to the evening event. It works when your team seeds each channel with a real question and replies to the early posts. Left empty, it tells attendees nobody is home. Left unmoderated, it fills up with sponsor posts.
Timing your communication
Each of these levers depends on people hearing about it at the moment they can act. The same message lands differently at 08:30 and at 15:40.
Take a hypothetical two-day programme with eight session slots a day. A push at the start of every slot is 16 notifications per person before a single meeting reminder. Most people will mute the app by the first afternoon and then miss the one message that mattered. Two or three announcements a day, each tied to something people can do, keep the channel worth reading:
- Each morning: the day's highlights, and which roundtables still have seats.
- Before each networking block: where the meeting area is, and a nudge to check recommendations.
- The evening of day one: what starts first tomorrow, and any room changes.
- The last afternoon: look through your connections and rate the sessions you attended.
Target where you can. Speakers need a reminder about Q&A and exhibitors need to know how lead scanning works, but neither belongs in everyone's notifications. Conecta sends announcements by push, email or both, to everyone or to one role or company, either straight away or scheduled. The communication tools cover both channels.
After the event
Engagement after the doors close is mostly about what people do with what they collected.
- Ask for ratings while memory is fresh. Session ratings and meeting ratings on the last afternoon are more honest than a survey a week later.
- Prompt follow-up. Remind attendees to message the people they met, on the last afternoon and again a couple of days later.
- Keep the space open. Roundtable chats and the networking space stay useful for a while, especially for people who swapped details but never booked a meeting.
- Close the loop. Tell attendees what you will change next year because of their ratings. People take part more readily once they have seen it lead somewhere.
Coming back next year is the strongest sign of engagement and the slowest to measure. Compare attendee lists year on year and look at who returned.
What to measure
Measure actions as a share of the people who could have taken them. Raw counts flatter big rooms.
Say two hypothetical sessions run on the same day. The keynote has 200 people in the room and receives 12 questions. A breakout has 50 people and receives 9. The keynote looks busier, but that is 6 questions per 100 people against 18 per 100 in the breakout. Whatever the breakout's moderator did is worth copying.
For networking, a short set of numbers covers most of what you need:
- Opt-in rate. People who joined networking, out of those with tickets.
- Share with at least one accepted meeting. The closest measure of whether networking worked for an individual.
- Acceptance rate. Accepted requests out of requests sent.
- Meetings per participant. Read it next to the share above, so a few very active people don't hide a quiet majority.
Conecta's organizer analytics report these alongside meetings by status and the split between meetings booked before and during the event. For sessions, count questions and poll answers per head, and note which sessions had a moderator who used them. Our guide to measuring event networking goes through how to read the numbers together.
Common mistakes
Gamification for its own sake
Points for completing a profile and leaderboards for check-ins reward activity, not value. People work out quickly how to score, and the leaderboard ends up topped by whoever sent the most requests, often a sponsor. If you add any game element, tie it to an action you wanted anyway, such as visiting exhibitor booths at a trade fair, and keep meetings out of it entirely.
Too many notifications
Every notification spends a little of the attention you will need later, and people who mute the app on day one rarely unmute it on day two.
Tools without an owner
Q&A needs a moderator in every room. The social wall needs someone posting and moderating. Polls need a speaker willing to use them, and roundtables need briefed hosts. If nobody on the team owns a tool, switch it off rather than leave it visibly empty.
Counting opens as success
A report full of app opens tells you people looked at their phones. It doesn't tell you whether the right people met, or whether anyone asked the question they came with.
In short
Define engagement as things attendees do, and pick the few actions that matter for your event before you pick tools. Set them up before the doors open and brief the people on stage. Give networking its own time on the agenda, and send fewer messages, each at a moment when people can act on it. Then measure actions per head rather than app opens, and change one thing next year based on the weakest number.