Let’s face it, all-day meetings surrounded by four bland walls watching endless PowerPoint presentations is a snoozer.  Talk about boring – yawn.  It’s not long before the phones are out and attendees are secretly scrolling through emails, checking Instagram or trying to advance to the next level of Candy Crush. According to Peter Toohey, a professor at Calgary State University, boredom can lead to indifference or apathy.  Certainly not the effect meeting planners or event speakers wish to have on their audience.

But what’s a meeting planner to do when presentations are a must and attention spans are limited?  Leverage the power of the very technology that’s making it easy for attendees to disengage. By incorporating web-based apps, planners can create interaction between speaker and audience as well as the audience members themselves. Here are six apps that are sure to break the boredom and keep your audience engaged.

6 Meeting & event apps worth using

Glisser – Glisser changes the boring one-dimensional Power Point presentation, through live tactics like polling and digital Q&A, allowing attendees to participate and interact with a speaker. Presenters can actually share slides to attendees’ phones during their presentation. Audience members simply download the app so they can like, comment or even share those slides to their own social networks.  But wait, there’s more…every interaction your participants make contribute to analytics that measure event ROI.

eventScribe – eventScribe also enables meeting participants to access presentation slides, which they can then annotate and easily share with other attendees. They can also ask questions, post comments and connect with other attendees via a private social networking platform.

Buzzmaster – The Buzzmaster app turns meeting attendees’ smartphones into interactive devices. Quizzes, multiple-choice questions, or statements, enable the audience to become part of the conversation. “BuzzMasters”, aka journalists or event managers, moderate responses in real time and can add new questions on the spot to help create a ‘buzz’.  The Buzzmaster app has a whopping 80 percent audience participation rate clearly boosting attendee engagement.

Live Insights – Live Insights is a mobile polling and feedback app that allows attendees to answer multiple-choice questions, or cast votes directly from their smart phones. This app gives presenters the option to either create questions prior to the meeting or develop questions on the spot based on attendee comments thus boosting audience interaction.

Crowd Mics  – Crowd Mics is an app that turns the audience’s phones into wireless microphones. Using a venue’s wired network and sound system, the Crowd Mic “Atom box” creates individual microphones from attendees smartphones. The speaker or moderator uses an iPad app interface to control who speaks. The purpose of Crowd Mic is to involve the audience and encourage dialogue. Turning personal cell phones into personal microphones enables individuals to, in effect, share the stage with the presenter.  Yes, even those attendees in the back row.  As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.”

Slido –  The Slido app offers live Q&A, polling and presentation features that enable attendees to directly interact with a meeting presenter. The app’s premium features allows attendees to comment and answer questions posed by the presenter and other audience members thereby creating a highly interactive environment.

Boosting audience engagement through apps and environment

Keeping your audience stimulated and engaged Is no easy task. But technology is quickly turning boring into exciting through these interactive apps. Likewise, holding your meeting in a casually luxurious, coastal destination like Newport Beach, CA can easily increase attendee participation.

When you’re ready to plan your next group program and need to boost engagement turn to the staff at Visit Newport Beach, the destination marketing organization for Newport Beach, CA. Visit Newport Beach opens the doors to this Pacific paradise with destination expertise, customized site visits, strong partnerships and resources to ease the planning process.

Written by Visit Newport Beach Meetings