Are you considering plans for your upcoming conferences or seminars? You might be thinking about the feasibility of doing an event online. It might be that you have never ran an online event before, your worried about the technology or the experience for the audience.

Well here are a few suggestions of things you can do to improve the experience for you attendees at your next online event.

1. Use polls

A great simple interactivity tool that has been generating results for our clients. At the start of each section of the event the speaker will share a poll. We will ask the audience to vote on the poll and at the end of that section we share the results.

The speaker then spends a few minutes reflecting on the results.

2. Ask your audience questions

There is a reason for the ‘chat’ function. We use the chat function as much as possible. An example of this, is when we start any event, we spent the first few minutes of the event asking people to, “write into the chat where you are watching from”. This not only gets people familiar with the chat function but also shows other people are watching and engages the audience.

We then get the event host to read out a few of the responses as they arrive. This really allows the speakers to feel connected to the attendees.

3. Bring your audience into the discussion

A little something unexpected you can do is to bring your audience into the discussion. Instead of just asking your audience to write questions into the chat, why not bring them into the discussion? The best way to do this is by promoting them to be a panellist or if you software does not allow you to do this, get them to record a video in advance and play this at the event.