In every meeting, it’s easy to identify the people most interested in creating and receiving value. Whether their hands are always going up, they’re typing feverishly into a keypad, or their name is always at the top of the leaderboard, they are highly engaged and add to the conversation. Maybe not as noticeable are those who are only engaged to a point, maybe answering some of the polling questions and minimally interacting with content and presenters. Of course, in every meeting there are people who are happy to simply watch and listen. Array’s proprietary scoring methodology, the Array Content Engagement Score (ACES), places attendees into four unique categories, highlighting these different roles that audience members can play in a meeting: Conversationalists, Contributors, Joiners and Spectators.
Why does this matter? Conversationalists and Contributors – those who interact with content and presenters through activities such as asking questions, taking notes and saving slides – are more likely to understand and retain information shared during the meeting. Research shows attendees who engage with Array at this level have a nearly 20% improvement in knowledge compared to Joiners and Spectators. This is particularly important for life science meetings, where this represents an understanding of critical protocols, processes and compliant messaging. Audience interaction is also an effective way to collect data that can inform sponsors of opportunities and challenges that are important to their objectives. Joiners and Spectators provide little to no additional data since they don’t interact with the features designed to collect information.
Engagement is partially driven by a person’s personality and inclinations. However, there are ways to encourage and create opportunities for higher engagement—potentially inspiring a reluctant Joiner to become an enthused Contributor! Array’s platform has many features that make it interesting and easy to interact with content and speakers and our team works with clients to plan how best to use these. As a result, in 2024, 56% of attendees using Array were classified as either Conversationalists or Contributors.
With research demonstrating engagement influences learning, its important to use technology such as Array to engage audiences and improve knowledge transfer.
