Are you looking for new ways to increase engagement at your conference? Would you like to hear and see attendee feedback raving about a new feature? Do you want a measurable way to report results to your key stakeholders, including sponsors?
If you attended MPI’s WEC this year, you may have learned some answers to the questions above.
MPI WEC 2013’s “Play The Game” was a collaboration between MPI, QuickMobile (app provider), San Francisco Travel and PSAV (sponsors), and my company, Geoteaming (conference gamification). The game was simple: Click the trophy icon on the conference app, login with your MPI identification and complete the photographic objectives to win prizes. Take a picture, submit and move on to the next photographic objective.
Here are the top takeaways from this year:
- Engage Early: A pre-conference game was launched three weeks before the conference, creating increased awareness and logins. Last year’s participation was broken by the end of the first day of the conference and increased participation by 57 percent over last year!
- Less Is More: To make the game more accessible and easy to complete, we cut the objectives from over 222 to 31. This created 411 percent more engagement per mission, focusing on what stakeholders wanted to focus on. More people played and more people experienced the key features of MPI WEC 2013.
- What Do You Want?: Extensive consulting with all stakeholders ensured that everyone was clear on the conference objectives, and then the game’s photographic objectives were designed to support those goals. While it was challenging and took time to carefully select priorities, the game fully supported the conference objectives.
- Networking Upside Down: Sponsors loved the fact that the networking game was turned upside down. Instead of suppliers chasing planners down, the game helped planners find sponsor suppliers! This year’s MPI WEC gamification helped create over 1,100 documented face-to-face visits. This is a key result that sponsors appreciate for their support.
- Make It Easy. This year we partnered with QuickMobile to go from two app downloads to one to play the game. Next, we had six people on-site to help people login, in addition to QuickMobile’s App Coaches, who helped install the app. Once in, we chose to use very few features this year so the game was easy to learn and use. Do everything you can to “Lower the Bar” to entry into the game and you’ll see your participation continue to rise.
John Chen, CEO of Geoteaming and the author of 50 Digital Team Building Games, is a corporate team-building and gamification expert. With over 1,100 events and 90,000 participant experiences, John has won the MPIWSC Supplier of the Year and the MPIWSC Corbin Ball Technology Award. He has gamified large conferences such as BBWorld and two MPI WECs. You can follow his blog at blog.geoteaming.com.
