As the event industry continues to evolve post-pandemic, gamification has proven to be a mainstay for effectively engaging eventgoers, even as events have come back in-person full force. For planners who have yet to experiment with gamifying elements of the attendee experience, perhaps gamification is a new frontier of interaction, offering an opportunity to tap into what everyone loves so much about popular app games like Candy Crush.
For others, however, it’s another thing involving looking down at a phone screen. Andrew Wanjohi, the Kenya-based founder behind BARBAH Games, disagrees.
“Gamification should enhance human connections, not just digital touchpoints,” he told Vendelux.
Will Curran also hears this sentiment all the time in his position as a strategic advisor and brand ambassador for Klik, Bizzabo’s wearable “SmartBadge” tech, which sees exhibitors, attendees and sponsors alike checking in and sharing contact information—and gamifying the whole process—by tapping badges together. The Klik technology is part of a bigger trend emerging in the space: to implement gamification without the use of phones.
But because this isn’t a Klik ad, Curran offered that “you don’t even need event technology” to incorporate gamification. “You could literally, using paper, print out a Bingo card and make each square one of your top sponsors that should be seeing value and that spent a lot of money with you,” Curran explained. If attendees meet with those sponsors and “check off all the boxes on the Bingo card, they get entered to win 100% off tickets to next year, or whatever it may be.”
The point is not to gamify everything, according to Curran, but to align the game with your event’s objectives. It’s the answer to the first question asked in this article’s headline: When should event planners use gamification?
This question is best answered by the response to more questions, per Curran, who suggested making these queries in the early stages of planning an event:
“What are my goals? And how do I align the gamification to that?”
If an event is focused on networking, consider “matchmaking challenges or scavenger hunts that encourage meaningful conversations,” Wanjohi suggested, noting that “engagement should go beyond just points and badges.” Wanjohi also said to ask, “Who is my audience, and what motivates them?” as well as “Will gamification add real value or feel like an unnecessary gimmick?”
Comic-Con, for example, hosted an eSports-style competition for the comic, movie, TV and pop culture fans that attend the fest to win exclusive merch. Global tech conference Web Summit, meanwhile, which attracts tech-industry CEOs, startup founders and policymakers, fittingly tapped AI to power matchmaking games that Wanjohi said “encouraged attendees to meet potential business partners via challenges.
These case studies prove the importance of “organically weaving mechanics into the event flow,” Wanjohi said. Another option: a “live-polling trivia game during keynote sessions [that] can make learning interactive without disrupting the event’s purpose.” SXSW is already on it, implementing “a session engagement leaderboard where attendees earned points for live Q&A participation and interactive polling,” Wanjohi added.
Whichever game you decide on, it’s vital to communicate it to your attendees. “The biggest challenge that I see is undercommunication about the game and the rules, what’s in it for them [attendees], and constantly reminding them,” Curran said. “It’s sometimes just as simple as, are you willing to put signage up? Are you willing to go on stage and take a break from your opening keynote to explain the rules? Are you willing to put that effort in, or are you just willing to slap a sign somewhere and hope it works?”
A couple of signs “is not going to be super successful,” Curran said. Rather, for real engagement, “signage everywhere should explain the rules, the points, how it works, what’s at stake [and] the ability to win.” Then remind people of those points again during the opening keynote session, Curran said, and utilize things “like the rotating slides in breakout rooms that are constantly going to put the rules up again.”
Once an eventgoer chooses to participate, a quick, small win should follow almost immediately, according to Curran, who suggested offering “the first stamp at the center of the Bingo card, for example, at the booth right next to the registration table.”
The final step is to effectively track the success of the game, which proves why gamification should be part of an event. Look at “participation rates, time spent on activities, completion and achievement rates,” according to Wanjohi. And if someone only completed 50% of a Bingo card, for example, Curran urged to also “find out why.” This is where post-event surveys come into play.
When executed correctly, gamification “becomes authentic, not a side hustle in the event,” Curran said, adding that it facilitates attendees in doing what they want to do more, whether that be networking, getting leads from a specific sponsor or checking into booths or other touchpoints.
By gamifying natural elements of the guest experience—and then making guests want more of that thing—it’s “like the Farmville era,” Curran said. “It’s the idea that you could take a monotonous task and make people have to log into their phones everyday to prune their virtual gardens.”
