Getting Your Audience Involved

In this session we want to take some time to discover how you can get your audience involved in the event. After all this is one of the reasons to use a customized online platform. Providing customized communication opportunities throughout the event both from you to the attendees, between the attendees and from the attendees back to you is highly desirable to keep audience engagement high and for everyone to achieve the objectives they have through the event. Sardius provides a number of options for these purposes:

Moderated Chat and Watch Parties

Providing your audience with the ability to chat as a group or as smaller geographic or affinity based watch parties has become an expected feature in recent years.

Providing your audience with the ability to chat as a group or as smaller geographic or affinity based watch parties has become an expected feature in recent years. We have already mentioned above the pitfalls of having too many attendees in a chat window and the rationale for watch parties. However to get the most out of this feature, it is helpful to think intentionally about how you would like attendees to interact rather than allowing the unmoderated wild west, unproductive and sometimes downright nasty comment sections many will intentionally avoid on some websites (and for your comfort, because we provide moderated chat, we both flag and mute offensive language and provide moderators the ability to mute trolls, so that they continue their trolling behavior to their heart’s content, oblivious to the fact that they have been placed in a cone of silence).

We believe “Intentional” Chat includes:

Using presenters, pastors or subject matter experts as moderators - this gives the presenter the ability to guide conversation and ask and answer specific questions.

Guided Conversation - You have hopefully already figured out the “why” of your event. Chat used effectively can forward these goals. If you are in a watch party with an affinity group with a subject matter expert moderating, this can be an opportunity for an enriching conversation. It is even an opportunity to network in a way that is more natural around mutual interests versus awkward cold-open conversations. It may be that from such a productive chat that the moderator decides to open up a video conference room and the group can continue the conversation in a face to face setting.

Direct Messaging with the Moderator - We will address attendee to attendee networking below, but one option that has proved effective is for private direct messaging to the moderator for a number of reasons. It may be that the moderator or the on screen presenter has asked for questions and this can be facilitated through this DM feature. It may also be that an attendee has private counselling or prayer needs that the moderator can take offline with the attendee.

Sardius provides moderator training as part of a bespoke event as we believe in the potential of this tool if used correctly. The accompanying handout to this moderator training can be found in Appendix 5
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Other Tabs and Integrations in the SideBar
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‍While much interaction can happen around chat between attendees and event hosts, the sidebar is a critical area of event interaction that is not limited to simply chat. Different tabs on the side bar can add different types of interaction depending on your type of meeting. Examples of other tabs might be integration with online bibles and notes for church meetings and conferences or a giving portal or even a retro game - we put a pong game in this space as well in addition to the polls and trivia (see below). These are just a few ideas, but try us out - how else might your audience interact with the content in real time.
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Downloadable Content

Conferences are a good place to point people to buy other content through commerce links and integrations, however many want to give conference attendees other accompanying materials that complement the different sessions of the conference. These might be ebooks or handouts that highlight certain training topics, they may be other audio or video content that take the attendee deeper in a certain topic that communicates added value for the attendee who is at the event and can be delivered as part of the platform rather than the presenter simply referencing the resource, but not giving the audience an easy on ramp to access the content.

Polls and Trivia

One of the benefits of live broadcasting your event is the ability to directly engage with the audience in real time, this means that the audience can ask you questions in real time, but it also means that you can ask questions of the audience and then interact with the answers. This may be through traditionally polling on issues that are important to your mission or it might even be trivia competitions where there is a prize at stake. Keeping your audience on their toes through a degree of gamification may not be the worst idea in the world :).

Overlays

In many event scenarios it is helpful to include a degree of video graphics over the video. This may be lower thirds describing who is speaking now; it may be a logo placed at the top corner of the video, it may be a call to action for a giving campaign or a call to buy a product. While it looks good to include these graphics, it is also helpful if such “overlays” can include a hyperlink to the specific call to action that is being highlighted at that particular moment. The Sardius platform offers the event producer the ability to schedule such hyperlinked overlays or simply to trigger them in the moment when the call to action is happening. Even if the trigger is spontaneous, such overlays need forward planning and creating so that the presentation can be seamless. In some events you may have already created custom animated graphics that are already embedded within the video. It is still possible to make such graphics interactive by creating transparent hyperlinks to place over the in-video graphics.