5 Gamification Ideas to Drive Engagement at Your Virtual Event

Feb 04, 2022 Ayushi Tiwari

Are you looking for exciting gamification ideas for your virtual events? We are well aware of the rising shift to remote work culture in past the two years. Every interaction has moved to Zoom, Teams or other virtual event platforms. While virtual events are certainly gaining an ample amount of popularity, chances are that without the correct engagement strategy and effective marketing tools you won’t probably get the right kind of engagement you are looking for. 

Gamification has been keeping audiences engaged since the rise of smartphones. Interesting gamification ideas for your virtual events tend to create a positive memorable experience for all. Incorporating this element into your virtual and hybrid events are a great way to increase audience engagement proactively and helps to retain the attention span of your event attendees. How so? Let us take a look.  

What is Gamification? 

Gamification is when you integrate fun virtual activities, into non-gaming domains (like game-based learning in education and events). Games have proven to be an essential tool to educate or increase the attention span of an individual. For instance, in your virtual events, games can introduce a sense of competition (in a positive way), achievement and winning - all of these in turn can trigger excitement and happiness.  

Gamification for events and engagement 

The biggest challenge in a virtual event is the short attention span. Since attendees aren’t present physically together, therefore, they may get distracted pretty easily. Most of us are currently home-bound and so there are a number of distractions around, the biggest of all being our phones and constant notifications popping up. All these issues make it pretty difficult to keep an individual focussed during the event. Here’s a quick example of how to plan a kick-ass virtual event.  

If you want your event attendees to be more engaged and involved in your virtual event, check out these 5 virtual gamification examples to drive engagement.  

1. Have a gamification corner 

Create an exclusive gaming counter, where your event attendees can indulge in some recreational activities in between sessions, where they aren't attending or breaks. If you are tight on budget, you can easily set up a gaming corner where online games can be easily set up like - chess, football, online Pictionary etc.  

If you have a decent budget then incorporating AR & VR games for your event attendees is a great option, too. This way you will grab a lot of eyes and more people might be interested to participate in your events. Check out if you are looking to develop mind-blowing event strategies from squid games for your next virtual event.   

By having a gamification corner, you can be sure attendees will be engaged throughout the span of your event.  

2. Incorporate networking and ice breaking virtual games  

The best way to get your attendees to network with one another is through games. Organize simple games for an ice-breaking session since, it is a nice way to get everyone familiar with one other. You could also divide your attendees in small teams and give out challenges to compete with other teams.  

These games can be organized at the beginning of your virtual event or during session breaks. It is good to break the monotony of a webinar and kickstart your session. Organizing gaming activities like these will help to drive more engagement and enable attendees to network well with fellow event attendees in a more fun way. Games like two truths, one lie, rapid-fire, name the character, Atlas, Bingo are great activities to begin with.  

3. Incentivize communication through gamification

To make sure that your audience is engaging and networking with fellow attendees you can incentivize their every communication through gamification. In a virtual event, people try to network with guests, speakers, panelists, and fellow attendees. Some of the well-known marketing influencers think that in order to encourage active engagement throughout the event the best way is to motivate them to participate in Q&A, post questions in open forums, and ask meaningful questions, etc. When you incentivize this activity people will be motivated and participate for the rewards.  

Brownie points can be awarded to those attendees who are actively attending all the sessions, being active in the event community. Throughout the course of the event, every activity will have some points, and participants with the highest scores can win exciting rewards.  

4. Gamification and polling  

The most interesting way to get audience feedback is through polling. Polling can be done for specific sessions, speakers, activities or overall event experience. The best way to pull the audience’s attention is to let them decide and vote for different aspects of the event.  

In order to encourage people to poll, you can award badges to people who have participated in all the polling activities throughout the event. The polling can also be level-based, if an attendee crosses one level they will be rewarded with a particular kind of badge. People who have collected the maximum number of badges win a prize.   

5. Reward social media buzz 

In order to create a buzz on social media, one can incentivize social media mentions too. Since, creating a social media buzz can be a tedious task for event planners. If you gamify this task, where every social media mention gives event attendees some points, this can amplify your event’s mention, curate conversation and create a significant amount of digital noise.  

Level up your virtual events through gamification 

Any event planner should pay close attention to how are they going to keep their audiences hooked throughout their event. Check out additional virtual event engagement ideas to supercharge your business events. When event attendees are participating, networking, and connecting through such interesting activities, it will create memorable experiences for them. If you are interested to level up your virtual event game, Eventcombo has the perfect solution: Fireworks™ by Eventcombo offers exciting gamification activities for event attendees which create a fun, memorable experience for all.  

Using these above-mentioned gamification strategies will level up your virtual event manifold.