Wednesday,July 7th, 2010There are always memorable elements to any event—a great teambuilding activity, a humorous keynote speaker, great networking opportunities, etc. Sometimes the individual pieces that stick are content and objective focused, but often times they’re not. For an event to be truly memorable as a whole—engaging the brains of the audience with the content at a deeper level–three elements need to be employed on a larger scale.
The Art of Theater: Nothing engages the human mind like emotion. It’s the connection to our fellow man, our jobs, our world. It’s the primary influence in many decisions. An event should be an emotional experience—and a little theater goes a long way in producing an emotional outcome that supports content retention.
Theatrical elements can include game play (game shows, team activities, etc.), powerful video clips, stories etc. Theater isn’t about being ridiculous or novel for the sake of novelty, it’s about engaging your audience on an emotional level.
The Science of Learning: 95% of what is delivered in a typical meeting environment is forgotten 24 hours later. That’s a scary statistic for any meeting professional. This is primarily because, in general, events are not designed with the science of learning in mind.
Brain-based learning techniques can include giving breaks in between presentations for reflection, paring down information—sorting the nice to know from the need to know, preframing, informing and reviewing for all key content points, and utilizing activities to practice and apply knowledge.
The Psychology of Persuasion: An event is all about buy-in. An audience needs to buy-in to the content, to their participation in the event, to interaction, key content points, etc. A truly persuasive event is framed properly; eliciting commitment from the audience to play full out during the event, getting attendees to write down their own personal goals for the event and—after content pieces or presentations—recording how the new information will be relevant to them.
Going into the specifics of a presentation, presenters tend to lead with what persuades them. Everyone will buy-in to AN argument—but that doesn’t mean they’ll buy-in to YOUR argument. Play to all persuasion styles: data evidence, social proof, personal guarantees of success and relevance to achieving their goals.
Dan Yaman
I’ll be discussing more specific examples of theater, learning and persuasion in my “Brain-Based Events” session at e4.
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Dan Yaman is the President of Live Spark, a strategic event design company, developed innovative ways to help clients engage audiences. Dan’s pioneering methodology combines the “art of theater”, the “science of learning" and the "psychology of persuasion" to create environments where message comprehension and content retention soars. This unique brain-based approach helps his clients put on events that profoundly increase their ROI while making the event more enjoyable, meaningful and relevant for the audience. He also founded LearningWare—a company dedicated to making training more engaging and effective through the use of interactive game shows--in 1994. Additionally, Dan co-authored the best-selling training book "I'll Take Learning for 500: Using Game Shows to Engage, Motivate and Train" with Missy Covington. |
Great post. Succinctly presents the most important engagement techniques. For me dedicating time to allow participants to put what has been presented into their own words yields vital information regarding how much of the material “got in” in a relevant way.
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