by Juraj Holub, Marketing Manager, Sli.do
Challenge
Organized by IMEX, Exclusively Corporate is the dedicated education and networking event specifically for corporate meeting and event planners. For the IMEX 2015 edition, over 80 corporate executives gathered to participate in interactive sessions to expand their knowledge of organizing business meetings.
Advocating the importance of interaction at meetings, Exclusively Corporate @IMEX aimed to lead by example and, therefore, deployed a range of audience engagement techniques and tools, including sli.do, to engage its participants.
Goals
Moderators Padraic Gilligan and Patrick Delaney from SoolNua kicked off Exclusively Corporate with the interactive opening session, during which they aimed to:
- conduct instant surveys and polls to gauge audience opinion
- identify the key challenges that corporate meeting planners face in their jobs today
- determine attendees’ areas of competence and experience to foster engagement and connections during the sessions and networking breaks.
In order to achieve these goals, they decided to deploy audience interaction tool, sli.do.
Solution
For the interactive part of the opening session, Padraic Gilligan and Patrick Delaney prepared a clear storyline that they used to guide their audience. Instead of presenting a slide show, they used a series of sli.do polls to enhance their story, create an immersive experience and make everyone in the room feel part of the story.
First, they introduced sli.do and explained how to join in, giving everyone enough time to safely get into the app. They began their talk with two fun polls to make people feel comfortable with the tool. They then commented on the results, making everyone in the audience laugh and putting them at ease.
Next, they moved on to more industry specific polls such as how long people work in the industry and what is their role in the organization. They commented on each of the option results to point out the amazing knowledge in the room and make new planners feel welcome.
Last of all, Padraic and Patrick used the sli.do Q&A feature to crowdsource the biggest issues and questions that the participants wanted to get answered during the day. They asked participants to brainstorm their most burning questions and then send them in via sli.do.
As the questions were coming in, Padraic and Patrick read them out loud, and commented on them to make participants’ contribution feel appreciated. In the meantime, attendees could vote up others’ input, creating a list of the most burning issues in the process.
This way, Padraic and Patrick helped participants to clarify the reasons why they signed up for the Exclusively Corporate programme, thereby ensuring they left with specific information and contacts that would serve them through the rest of the IMEX show and when they returned to their jobs.
During the World Cafe session at the end of the day, groups were created based on the crowdsourced key topics. Participants could then choose three different topics and discuss each one in a small group for 15 minutes.
Conclusion & Feedback
Overall, sli.do helped the session moderators to actively involve attendees, crowdsource their priorities and as a result help them maximize their time at the IMEX show. The presenters replaced traditional presentation tools with a series of sli.do polls that they used to endorse their story and let the audience co-create it in real time.
Thanks to Juraj Holub for this week’s post on how meetings attendees can turn into participants. Thanks, moreover, to Peter Komornik and the entire sli.do team for creating such a beautiful tool, truly capable of helping us transform meetings into genuine encounters