Array Staff Share How to Design for Engagement and Insights at Medical Meeting Professionals Virtual Summit

June 7, 2022 Array Team

Denver, CO – During the Medical Meeting Professionals Virtual Summit 2022, hosted by Momentum Events on May 17-18, two of Array’s staffers presented sessions aimed at helping meeting planners increase content engagement in a way that curates data that leads to actionable insights. The theme of the summit was, “Reimagine Medical Meetings and Congresses, and the Evolving Role of the Pharma Meeting Planner.”

“As virtual and hybrid events are now the norm, many meeting planners are struggling to understand how to produce events that generate meaningful engagement,” said Kristen Hunter, senior director of life sciences content at Momentum Events. “A main theme of this year’s summit is not only the collection of valuable data, but how to translate that data into actionable items to improve the objective of your events.  The two-part presentation from Array demonstrated both in an interactive way so the audience could participate and understand.”

On day one, Ryan Mazon, senior vice president of business development, and Chuck Levitan, senior solutions engineer, presented “Optimize Engagement at Hybrid and Virtual Events Through Effective Meeting Design.” Early in the presentation, Levitan introduced the statistic that 90 percent of Americans multitask during virtual meetings, noting it pertains to all meetings, not just medical.

“This makes engaging an audience that much more important,” said Mazon. “Especially in a virtual environment, you have to be able to combat that and make sure they want to stay here.” He explained there are many engaging techniques to use to maintain audience attention, but simply asking a question to get their attention doesn’t add value to the meeting host. It’s better to ask a question that garners data you can use later to form a bigger picture. “Create an environment where you’re collecting information that is actually helpful,” added Mazon.

The two then provided Six Steps for Meeting Design to Maximize Engagement:

  1. Define event goals and success metrics. Start with the end in mind and clearly define what you want the audience to learn from you—and what you want to learn from them.
  2. Create interactive opportunities. Boost participation and information retention with surveys, polls, and gamification—but make sure that what you’re asking aligns with your event goals.
  3. Establish collective baseline knowledge. Evaluate your audience's opinions or current understanding of a subject with a pre-event survey.
  4. Plan for flexibility. Allow your audience to help guide the event by asking them what topics they are most interested in or by focusing on knowledge gaps you identify in polling.
  5. Emphasize engagement. Remind your audience to ask questions or take notes on important parts of the presentation.
  6. Measure knowledge transfer. Assess your audience's new level of understanding with a post-session survey, comparing the responses to the pre-session survey to measure the impact of your event.

In discussing these, they stressed that it’s important to have plans in place to allow for flexibility in your program. “Your programs don’t necessarily have to be linear,” said Levitan. “Use some of these tools to start to understand what your audience is retaining. For example, if you conducted an in-program poll and saw that 30 percent of the audience missed a question on the second try, you probably really need to reeducate the entire audience at that point. Adjust your programming to do that. That’s how you can effectively use tools to achieve your objectives because you’ve monitored and prepared for that.”

The presenters utilized Array’s virtual content engagement technology during the session actively demonstrate the 6-steps as they presented them, engineering engagement through the use of polling, surveys, gamification, and more. With each interaction, they collected data from the audience to utilize in their follow-up session.

On day two, they presented, “Engagement Insights: Putting Event Data into Action,” during which they demonstrated how to use data from one event to improve on another. Overnight, they analyzed data collected from participants on day one, then used that information to change the presentation given on the second day. By doing this, they were able to better focus the second event to address attendees’ stated goals and interests and respond to their feedback.

Mazon and Levitan stressed it’s important for planners to clearly define event objectives with their stakeholders. Then, design the data collection strategy in a way that it helps move you toward those objectives.

In the Q&A session, attendees asked questions related to how to analyze the data, or how to get help doing so. Mazon noted this has been an unmet need in the past, with event organizers obtaining raw data, but not necessarily having the time to do the type of analysis that gets them the insights they need to improve future events and inform business decisions. To fill that need, Array has recently introduced the Analytics and Insights Management team to help clients not only collect relevant data to their goals, but to help them understand those metrics and find actionable next steps to take.

To view the presentations in their entirety, visit www.arraylive.com.

 

ABOUT ARRAY

Array is a content engagement partner for life sciences events – with nearly 20 years’ experience at over 10,000 events. Our unique combination of technology and services is proven to improve business results by engaging more than 90% of audience members and increasing knowledge transfer while collecting meaningful analytics down to the individual participant level for actionable insights. Array offers technical support, event production expertise, and analytics interpretation and guidance to maximize the impact of in-person, virtual, and hybrid life sciences events. Based in Denver, CO, Array is a private company. www.ArrayLive.com

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