Standing out with Audience Engagement: 4 Secrets to Conducting Effective Life Sciences Meetings

As life sciences meeting professionals, you understand that attending meetings is just another item on a to do list for many healthcare professionals and other stakeholders. While these meetings can be invaluable opportunities to share knowledge and learn from others, they can also be overwhelming and cause the attendees to zone out and go on autopilot. One way to make the most of these events and to ensure meeting goals are achieved is to focus on audience engagement. In this blog we will cover 4 secrets to effective life sciences meetings that will help you stand out in the minds of your participants:

1. Have a plan for your meeting goals
2. Utilize engagement tools
3. Encourage participation with gamification
4. Use post-meeting follow up to address gaps in knowledge

Have a plan for your meeting goals

Planning with the end in mind is an important aspect of making sure that your life science meetings are effective. Having a plan for what information is most important to the success of your meeting, what kind of ROI you are looking to achieve, and more, will help you be able to design the most effective meeting. 

Utilize engagement tools 

Engagement tools such as polling, surveys, direct response Q&As, the ability to take notes on and interact directly with the slides, and more are key ways to keep your attendees’ attention fixed on the material being presented. Not only do they make the presentations more engaging as a whole, but they also are shown to improve knowledge retention and transfer. Incorporating these tools into your meetings are a great way to ensure that your participants are engaged and that you get the most out of your meetings.

Want to learn more about the engagement tools that Array offers? Learn more here!

Encourage participation with gamification

Gamification is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation,” and can be used in educational meetings. Engaging your audience with slight competition through the gamification of the polling questions is a good way to encourage everyone to engage, even if they typically wouldn’t. Oftentimes including a feature such as a leaderboard of fastest responders or confidence-based gaming spark the competitive side of many participants and adds an aspect of fun to an educational presentation. This also gives you an opportunity to collect additional data about how well the information is being received and processed by the participants and allow you to make adjustments as needed for the improvement of your meeting.

Use post-meeting follow up to address gaps in knowledge

If you utilize engagement tools throughout your meeting, you will have collected data from the attendees including areas where participants may have struggled with the content or gotten some key information wrong. If a large number of attendees got the incorrect answer on a particular question, you can address that by adjusting the way the content is presented going forward and sending a post-meeting clarification. Using this data to do both group and individual follow-ups enables you to constantly improve your meeting strategy and get the most out of the meeting. 

Standing out with audience engagement is critical to making the most of life sciences meetings. By planning for meeting goals, utilizing engagement tools, encouraging participation with gamification, and following up after the meeting to fill in any gaps, you can engage your audience and ensure that your meeting is effective and impactful.