5 Ways to Cultivate Meaningful Engagement During Your Next Show

Humans are social creatures, hardwired to seek connection in community. And in today’s digitally engaged world, it’s becoming harder to find those authentic human connections, even as we’re needing them more than ever. 

As we continue living our lives in a digital-first world, it’s crucial to create opportunities for technology to bring us together. Oftentimes these opportunities are centered around a story, one where we can share connections and find similarities with one another. Crafting your show to include content that brings people together is imperative to encouraging engagement and fostering those opportunities to connect. 

These days, we know that online and hybrid events are becoming the places to be when looking to connect with like-minded people. Platforms like Streams provide the tech for these incredible events, which includes customizable features to facilitate impactful storytelling, interaction and sharing. That said, making genuine connections requires vulnerability and openness, and it can be intimidating to do that digitally. To encourage people to connect at your events, it’s important to provide the right guidance and utilize the right tools.

1. Lay the groundwork for connection

Before your event begins, encourage attendees to join early in order to get familiar with your event’s set-up. One of the first things they can do is set-up their user profile, a feature that serves as their “first impression” to other attendees throughout all aspects of the event.

Attendees can also scope out who else will be attending by using the attendee directory. In doing so, they can familiarize themselves with the types of companies joining an event, see the interests of others, or to simply get a lay of the land on what types of people they could possibly be connecting with.

Additionally, event creators will want to use the in-platform announcements so that they can keep attendees in the loop of the show’s flow, ensuring they won’t miss a special moment during the broadcast or an opportunity to interact.

2. Create engaging moments through storytelling

To spark moments of connection for your event attendees, it’s important to tell a captivating story, one with a specific theme or goal. This way, your attendees will have a story to rally around, one with aspects they can relate to and connect with.

You can use the chat with text, gifs and emojis to start getting attendees more comfortable interacting with your content and engaging with others in a low-stakes way. Being able to comment in the live chat during a particularly impactful moment during a speaker’s talk is a good way to get comfortable with communicating with others. You can also utilize the Q&A and polls to open up the conversation for even more engagement.

Plus, by starting small, attendees are essentially “reading the room” and getting a vibe of the event, which will allow them to better express themselves, ultimately leading to more engagement and having a deeper connection with the content of the event itself.

3. Encourage attendees to connect with speakers on-stage

Even in our digital worlds, communicating verbally with someone really enhances the level of connection you can feel with them. And while your event may be better suited to only include your live speakers peppered in with pre-recorded segments, sometimes it makes sense to create engaging moments by inviting an attendee to the virtual stage.

A level-up from the connecting via polls, chat and Q&A is firesides, where an attendee can essentially raise their hand to then be called onto the virtual stage to ask a question or chat with the speaker directly. This 1-on-1 live interaction naturally creates authentic reactions, memorable for those on-stage as well as the audience watching.

4. Plan synchronized moments between attendees

As your event continues on, and after your attendees become more comfortable interacting with the event and other attendees, you can get folks even more engaged by creating a synchronized moment using breakout sessions.

Breakout sessions give showrunners the ability to divide attendees into groups by interest, ticket types, and more. These small-group breakouts can help to facilitate group discussions relevant to your event’s theme, giving people the opportunity to bond over a specific topic or activity and have a real chance to make a genuine connection.

5. Help keep the conversation flowing

When the breakout session chats are through, that doesn’t mean the conversation needs to end! After your attendees have established some connections, encourage them to keep the convo flowing through event-level direct messages. As an event coordinator, you can allow 1:1 direct messages between individual attendees and group DMs between multiple attendees.

These moments of connection – big and small alike – drive engagement and bond us with others. After your event, your audience will recall these moments, and think fondly of your message and the experience they had. With some strategic thinking and an understanding of the tech features available for you to use, it’s possible to foster impactful connections at your virtual events.