Boost Event Engagement and Results with these Success Strategies

At TiER1, we use a method called Performance Experience Design (PXD) to create experiences that inspire behavior change and deliver the results you want. We focus on the whole person, considering their mindset and emotions in creating the event.

PXD is supported by our 5E’s Framework: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Extend. By considering the entire experience lifecycle—from the initial invitation to post-event follow-ups—the 5Es concept transforms your events by ensuring they captivate and resonate with your audience, leaving a lasting impact.

This comprehensive approach helps in capturing attention, maintaining engagement, and reinforcing key messages, leading to better outcomes and a more connected and motivated team.

Whether you’re planning a learning event, product launch, or strategy session, we believe in designing experiences that truly resonate with your audience, guiding them through a journey of engagement, reflection, realization, and personal growth.

To pull off a successful event—in-person, virtual, or hybrid—keep these key points in mind:

• Align with Your Objectives: Always stay true to your event goals.
• Consider the Best Format: Pick a format that best suits your attendees to maximize impact.
• Measure and Learn: Keep evaluating and applying insights to ensure continuous improvement and success.

Start with Purpose

Start with the event’s purpose by capturing the objectives to be accomplished and the audience’s needs. By gaining a deep understanding of those needs and what success may look like for participants, you can imagine what’s possible before putting plans in place.

Event objectives should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound.

Established objectives will help provide insights into what’s needed to bring the right experience to life. From there, you can explore both event format and measurement best practices so that there’s no debate on how to best design for success for your next event.

Consider the Experience

Here are some considerations for creating an impactful experience based on the audience, and the organization’s purpose and goals:

In-Person Live Events

• Building connections. Leverage in-person experiences to ramp up culture and feelings of belonging, which are critical psychological, and self-fulfillment needs best achieved in person.
• Introducing new products & tools. During events, there are typically new tools and products that are introduced. While undoubtedly these products can be featured online, it’s great to get a hands-on demonstration or be able to ask questions that are specific to needs and interests.
• Gaining hands-on experience. Team building, role-playing, and networking can be done virtually, but in-person engagement provides attendees the opportunity to dialogue and learn from one another.

Virtual Events

• Flexibility. A virtual event is flexible by design; there are options for fluidity of language, timing, level of interaction, monetization, and more.
• Managing costs. With virtual events, you save on the costs of venue, travel, hotel, food, and other in-person overheads. However, there should be an increased investment in technology to ensure an engaging and successful virtual experience for attendees.
• Tracking results and feedback. Online events provide the quick ability to track metrics such as level of participant interactions, audience engagement by speaker or topic, views by presentation or content, and more. Use this data to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of your event.

Hybrid Events

• Greater reach across multiple locations. In-person events have limits on the number of participants for logistical or geographical reasons. A hybrid event can increase your reach by attracting attendees who wanted to participate but couldn’t before. Coordinate shared experiences during the event through technology such as roaming cameras in the event space or virtual breakout sessions.
• Providing greater safety. Hybrid events offer all event participants more safety, comfort, and flexibility. With fewer in-person guests, it’s easier to space people out and adhere to social distancing. Guests can attend virtually if health concerns or travel restrictions prevent their in-person attendance.
• The best of both worlds. By combining “live” in-person events with virtual components, hybrid events ramp up the excitement and connect audiences who typically could not connect. Doing this successfully means designing moments that bring value to both in-person and virtual attendees. Include pre-event communications that consider in-person and virtual needs as well as post-event connections such as ongoing networking and 1:1 sessions.

How The 5 Es Create Experiences with Impact

In today’s dynamic workplace, creating meaningful and engaging event experiences for employee groups is more important than ever. This is where our 5E’s concept comes in—a framework designed to enhance every aspect of an event by focusing on the experience before, during, and afterward.

Entice: Attract participants with intentional invitations and build anticipation.

• Examples: teaser videos, pre-event mailers, themed itineraries, and pre-meeting assignments.

Enter: Set the stage by providing context, goals, and objectives early on.

• Examples: lobbies with music, greeters, fun polls, welcome messages, and guiding principles for participation.

Engage: Create an engaging and interactive experience that energizes and inspires.

• Examples: multiple perspectives, surprise elements, group and independent activities, breakout sessions, and gamification.

Exit: Make the conclusion memorable and build momentum for the future.

• Examples: voting apps, survey apps, summary drawing exercises, group photos, and virtual boards for follow-up thoughts.

Extend: Sustain the engagement and make insights actionable post-event.

• Examples: peer pairings, 1:1 scheduled check-ins, post-event emails, and a microsite with follow-up content.

Measure for Success

You can’t determine success without first defining what success looks like. Remember: defined event objectives are the framework for truly measuring success. You must have a clear grasp of the purpose of your event and set specific criteria to measure against those objectives.

Consider including the following standard event measurements in your evaluation set:

• Total number of registrations and check-ins. Total number of registrations is one of the most visible measures of event success, but it’s also important to compare that against the total number of check-ins. If there’s a significant gap between the two, investigate why people register but don’t attend.
• Engagement levels. Measure participation in Q&A, polls, and survey responses to assess attendees’ engagement and interest in the content.
• Speaker and activity ratings. You can measure attendee satisfaction by assessing speaking and event activity survey ratings. The higher the rating, the more relevant in addressing attendee needs and interests.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS). Always include in your post-event survey a question to assess the likelihood of audience recommendations to their friends or colleagues.
• Website traffic and online content engagement. Whether it’s downloading your slides, accessing additional content, or reviewing on-demand content, assessing traffic and content engagement is another good measurement of an event’s success

Get Started

Download The Design Canvas now and start planning unforgettable events!

Put people at the center of your event design with our PXD framework. Download the Virtual Meeting Design Canvas to:

• Set clear objectives
• Design engaging experiences
• Choose the right format
• Measure success

Looking for a thought partner to help plan your next impactful experience? Give us a call at (859) 415-1000 or drop us a line below.