Adding Gamification to Mobile Apps for Meetings

Gamification Features to Boost Mobile App Engagement for Meetings

Mobile apps are now considered a necessity in today’s meetings and events industry. They are crucial for networking, going digital with meeting documents, and improving attendee engagement. Most apps will include a standard features package, which includes but is not limited to an activity feed, attendees, documents, exhibitors, schedule, and photo gallery. But what’s missing is a feature that encourages attendees to actively utilize their app and focus on achieving the organizer’s end-goal for the app.

What do you want your attendees to get out of using the mobile app? Create a paperless event? Network with other employees, exhibitors, or sponsors? Improve employee knowledge about the company? Drive excitement with encouraging photographs? A gamification feature on your app may be the perfect solution to meet your mobile app usage goals.

Gamification can be tailored to emphasize certain areas of usage within the app. With a fully custom app, the organizer can determine what in-app activities earn more points than others during the meeting. If you want attendees to hone in on session content, you can skew the points allocation to award more points for successful quizzes taken. If your end-goal is to promote networking within the app, more points can be allocated and awarded to contact exchanges.

We will discuss more of our mobile app’s key gamification in-app activities and how each one can be customized to meet your event’s needs and to encourage attendee engagement.

Photo Gallery Submissions

Is this the first meeting where you have incorporated a mobile app? Or do your attendees historically not participate and engage with an event app? One of the most basic ways to encourage attendee engagement is to award points for images uploaded to the activity feed and photo gallery within the app. These are images that other app participants can like, comment, or even download and save in their own private photo gallery.

A word of caution is to moderate or put a limit on the number of photos an attendee can post and earn points for daily. Otherwise, you may end up with 50 pictures of one attendee’s food or other irrelevant photos not associated with the event. Typically a limit between 5-10 per person per day is sufficient and encourages attendees to post meaningful pictures of speakers, presentations, other attendees, etc.

Add Documents to a Digital “Briefcase”

A standard capability in apps is uploading documents for attendees to reference during the meeting. These can be session-specific, exhibitor-specific, or general meeting-related documents. Furthermore, attendees can often download any documents they choose and save them in a separate feature within the app called a document “briefcase” for easy access during the meeting.

Some reasons to promote document downloads to an attendees’ “briefcase” could include, but are not limited to:

• Going paperless for a meeting and want to incentivize attendees to access all event documents digitally
• If sponsors and/or exhibitors have information or promotions they want to share with attendees
• Important general session documents attendees can download and reference during a speaker’s session

If any of these apply to your upcoming meeting or you have another document-related scenario you would like to emphasize to your attendees, consider prioritizing the digital briefcase in-app activity in terms of point allocations. Make sure to note in your app that the most points are awarded per document downloaded so that your competitive attendees are aware of how to accumulate the most points during the meeting.

Session Check-In

Session check-ins are typically an event organizer’s top priority when it comes to in-app activities. You are likely paying for attendees to be at your meeting and want them to participate in sessions and events.

To incentivize attendance, more gamification points can be allocated towards session check-ins than any other in-app activities. These check-ins can be designated with a 4-digit PIN code, a QR code that can be scanned, or both a PIN code and QR code.

Do you have a large vendor or exhibitor show floor available during your meeting? Are some vendors “gold status” while others may be “bronze status?” To encourage as many attendees as possible attend your gold exhibitor booths during the meeting, you can rank check-in values using the gamification feature. For example, if someone checks in to a gold exhibitor booth, they may receive 50 points, whereas a bronze exhibitor booth check-in may collect 15 or 20 points.

Utilizing this gamification feature for exhibitor booths is often highly valued by all parties. It allows the event organizer to provide a list of all attendees who checked in to one exhibitor’s booth to that particular exhibitor for future communications after the program. Additionally, it incentivizes attendees to visit with all of the exhibitors present at the meeting to broaden their industry network.

Quizzing

A caveat to using the check-in feature for an exhibit floor is that attendees may simply pass by booths and enter the 4-digit PIN code without even saying a word to the exhibitor. Enhancing your mobile app with quizzes and points awarded based on accuracy can help alleviate this possible issue.

Prior to the meeting, it is important to reach out to each exhibitor and ask if they would like to participate in a quizzing feature on the app based on topics they plan to discuss at their booth. It is recommended to have between three and five questions per booth. These can be multiple choice, check all that apply, or even true/false questions. The more topic-specific these questions can be, the better to avoid attendees blindly guessing the answers without participating in the booth presentation.

Once these individual quizzes have been uploaded to the app, attendees can open the exhibitor’s quiz while at their booth and answer the questions as the exhibitor is presenting. This feature promotes not only attendance at each booth but also engagement with the exhibitor and truly listening to what he or she has to say.

If you choose to go this route, it is recommended to weight correctly answered quizzes higher than session check-ins as more effort and attention is required to earn these points. It is also beneficial to schedule the quizzes to begin and end at certain times during the meeting. Keeping a quiz available only while the exhibitor booth is open will prevent attendees from sharing correct answers before or after.

Contact Exchange

Is networking your top priority for your meeting? If so, you can prioritize contact exchanges as an in-app activity for points accumulation. The contacts component provides attendees with a quick and easy method to acquire and store the contact information of other attendees.

The Contacts feature of an app allows attendees to share contact information once they have met each other in person. Within the Contacts feature, the attendee would be prompted to enter the other attendee’s 4-digit PIN code or scan the QR code to exchange contact information such as email address, phone number, company name, etc. Points can be awarded per contact exchanged during the meeting.

This feature is beneficial for both the attendees exchanging information as well as for the meeting organizer’s records. The organizer can pull contact exchange reports to see who is networking and with whom.

Prizes

We would be remiss not to mention the end-goal for attendees to participate in a gamification feature during the meeting. Many attendees will expect to receive a prize based on their engagement throughout the meeting. These prizes can be determined and awarded in several different ways.

The event organizer must first decide how many prizes he or she would like to award and when to do so. Some organizers prefer to award prizes based on top points earned daily. Others will simply do first, second, and third place prizes for overall points accumulated during the meeting as a whole.

To collect prizes, a popular option is to involve exhibitors and ask if anyone has a prize he or she would be willing to contribute as a giveaway for the top engaging attendee(s). Other options could be company promotional items, merchandise, or even gift cards.

Once your prizes have been collected, and a strategy is in place for what qualifications will be awarded during the meeting, the final piece is awarding the prizes to the individuals. Awards are often mentioned during the closing General Session or even as push notifications and announcements within the event app.

We’re here to help!

Are you ready to take your event app to the next level and increase your attendee engagement like never before? Let Brightspot be your guide and help you reach your goals. Drop us a line and let’s start thinking up some bright ideas!