What is Gamification and How Can it Improve Your Event?

What is gamification?

Gamification is much like it sounds. It’s a dynamic technique that involves ‘gamifying’ aspects of an event to encourage more participation from your audience. Games are fun and interactive – by bringing elements of this into your event, attendees are more likely to have a positive experience.

Examples of gamification techniques include:

• Point scoring and tracking via a leaderboard.
• Creating competition.
• Adding rules of play to an activity.
• Recognising and rewarding winners.

Practical gamification examples

Once you’ve recognised the right gamification techniques for your event, you need a way to deploy them at your event. To help you learn how to do this, we’ve picked out some of our favourite practical examples of gamification to give you some ideas.

• Photo competitions: you could challenge attendees to take fun photos with other visitors, or take pictures of as many things in a specific colour. Whatever you decide for a theme, the key element to make it ‘gamified’ is competition.
• Games: this is a pretty obvious one, but including physical or mental games as icebreakers or within the breaks of your event is a great way to get attendees to relax whilst staying engaged over a long day.
• Social media contests: posting on socials is the perfect way to keep remote attendees involved with the event alongside in-person attendees. Polls and quizzes are a great example as these can be shared on social media, or via digital links for everyone to take part.
• Scavenger hunts and puzzles: scavenger hunts and puzzles may require a bit more pre-planning, but they’re one of the best ways to have your attendees engage with different booths or areas of your event. They can also act as a fun way for people to learn where things are and become more familiar with the venue.

Top tip: don’t forget about Hybrid and Online Events! A lot of these gamification examples can be adapted for digital audiences.

How to include gamification in your event

Putting some of our gamification examples into practice is actually easier than you may think. Below are some key steps you can follow to make sure you implement any gamification techniques to the best of your ability.

• Choose a relevant gamification example: make sure any gamification you implement matches the tone of your event. In more casual events for instance, you have a bit more freedom to get creative with the types of games you include.
• Promote your efforts: gamification is no use if no-one knows about it! Make sure you promote any games, competitions and quizzes before and during the event to get maximum sign-ups.
• Create a leaderboard: using a leaderboard keeps tracks of winners, and can encourage people to participate to see their name at the top. But, make sure to keep it to friendly levels of competition.
• Celebrate and reward winners: people will need motivation to participate in any games. So, make sure you celebrate, shout out, and reward the winners of your competitions. These can be small prizes on the day, or bigger cash prizes depending on your budget.
• Get feedback: both positive and negative feedback can help your event grow and succeed. Make sure you offer plenty of opportunities for attendees to feedback on your gamification efforts.

How can gamification improve your event?

Whilst these practical gamification examples can be a lot of fun, they will add to your organisational to-do list. So, if you’re wondering if they’re worth the extra work, let’s take a look at how gamification can improve your event.

Increase attendee engagement

First and foremost, gamification is a fantastic technique to increase attendee engagement throughout your event. Engagement as a metric measures how people interact with your event, including how enthusiastic they feel about the experience. High levels of event engagement are vital to help:

• Attract more visitors.
• Improve attendance rates.
• Generate event awareness.
• Improve your business/brand reputation.

When people are more connected with your event, they’re more likely to attend future events under your banner, encourage others to do so, and share their experience on social media – all of which can help your event to succeed.

Create an experience

As we mentioned above, people are looking for more experience-first events. Attendees want to enjoy themselves, so you need to make your event memorable and exciting. Gamification is one way to do this, as it can help you to create a fun, collaborative and engaging atmosphere. Gamification also allows you to really push for more interesting technological collaborations – especially between digital and in-person attendees.

Top tip: technology is vital in gamification. You could even take advantage of AI to create interactive games in smaller spaces.

Collect attendee data

Data is everything. The right data will help you find out the characteristics and preferences of your audience, understand the areas where your event succeeds, and even isolate aspects that still need improvement.

Fortunately, gamification is a useful, and fairly passive, way of collecting data in a non-intrusive way. When people sign up to play games, or take part in your competition, your sign-up sheet is one of the first places to start collecting data. This can include anything from name and job title, to likes and dislikes depending on the depth of your form.

Top tip: anything that would be classified as personal data (name, age etc), must be kept safe and secure. 

When it comes to marketing, data collected from gamification efforts can help you understand individual user behaviour and create more bespoke and targeted marketing for products or services that are shown at your event – or even for future ones.

Interested in learning more about data collection? Check out our guide to Why You Should be Capturing First Party Data at Your Events and How to Do it.

Encourage networking

Networking at events can be incredibly daunting. But, using gamification techniques can make the prospect of meeting new people easier and more enjoyable. Plus, attendees may actually make better connections when they’re mixed into a game format. 

For example, one popular icebreaker you could use is to give each participant a bingo sheet. However, instead of numbers, these can be filled with prompts, like ‘has a sibling’, or ‘has travelled to…’. Not only are these ready-made conversation starters, but the added element of competition can encourage your attendees to speak with a broader range of people.

Top tip: make sure to add the caveat that each prompt needs to describe a different individual to ensure people make the most of the opportunity. 

Alternatively, including games or activities in the breaks encourages people to start conversations more naturally as they participate. This can help create a more relaxed atmosphere, and make networking less like a chore. You could even set up games areas in breakout rooms to give people a chance to relax and network at the same time.

Reinforce learning

Games help people to learn by making information easier to remember. By including certain aspects of gamification after important talks or presentations, like quizzes, you can help your attendees retain the relevant points better and get more value from the event.

Top tip: why not include live quizzes and polls during a presentation? This will definitely keep people on their toes and listening to the speaker. Plus, you can easily do this via an app for digital attendees.

Grow brand relationships

In a similar vein to the above, gamification can make brands or companies at an event more memorable and help to build stronger relationships with attendees. By having a positive interaction during a game, people are more likely to remember a business, which in turn can encourage them to invest in a product or service. 

This is especially important at conferences, where there will often be a range of booths for sponsors and other businesses looking to attract attention and new talent.

Top tip: make sure you choose a venue that can support your gamification ideas. At ACC Liverpool, we have a fantastic range of Production Services – and you can get valuable support from our team to make the most of any ideas you have for your event.

Level up your events with ACC Liverpool

Gamification is just one part of making your event stand out – there are loads of techniques to make your conference or event memorable for all the right reasons. Fortunately for you, our fantastic teams are always on hand to help you plan your next event. Find out Why You Should Choose ACC Liverpool today to discover more about our Venue – or contact our team for more information.

Plus, you can find plenty of advice and useful guides in our ACC Liverpool Resources hub…

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