A lot of things distract people nowadays, especially social media platforms. People tend to easily switch online to get edified and engaged if they find you boring at any time. The same thing goes for when you have to do a presentation at a conference. If your title is very interesting, you may be very lucky to have them prepare their minds for something worth the time. I mean some of them flew for several hours to book the date with you anyways. Apart from making them feel connected to you, you should try to help them network amongst themselves. It is very important to know how to hook your audience on and pass your knowledge across and you will be learning some tips on how to achieve that here.
Overcoming the barrier of language
Conferences usually have people from all over the world coming to grace the occasion. That will automatically pose one problem which is the diverse first languages of the audience. As an organizer, you want to make sure that communicating with your audience, and communication amongst themselves isn’t a problem. How do you achieve that with the language barrier? The answer is making use of simultaneous translation equipment. The use of this equipment in helping the multilingual audience feel connected with you and amongst themselves can not be overemphasized.
How a piece of translation equipment works
The equipment works with headphones and speakers technology. When you speak in a particular language, the simultaneous translation equipment interprets what you are speaking at the same time in all the languages present at the conference. The audience can listen to what you have said with their headphones. If they also need to ask a question, they can turn on their speaker, and once they speak in their own first language, it gets translated to all the other languages including yours. With technology like this, every member of your audience can connect with themselves and also with you.
Make individual inquiries about your audience and share them with everyone present
When you have a number of people coming to a conference you organized, you want them to be interested in gracing more of your future conferences. So, how you make them feel will be very good focal parameters in getting them to come back. Apart from making sure you engage your audience, you need to create an environment that allows for networking amongst the audience. One way to achieve this is penning down a quick biography of all members of the audience and publishing it in alphabetic order of their names for the members to view. Allow them time to quickly read through and have them introduce themselves quickly before you begin your presentation. So anyone who wants to meet another person will know who that person is during the introduction
Make the sitting arrangement helpful
Another way to make the people at your conference feel connected among themselves is by using the sitting arrangement strategy. You can arrange the seats with name cards on them. You can group those on the same career path on the same table depending on how the venue is arranged. You can also group those from the same country together. It is always awesome to find out that there is someone having something similar with you sitting close by.
Encourage interactions
When people converge for a conference, it is usually people from different countries and chances are that you wouldn’t have met anyone in the gathering before unless of course you went with friends. In a gathering like that, people tend to maintain a lot of decorum. No one wants to be a standout extrovert. As the organizer, you need to let the audience know that you welcome an interactive session. Let everyone be free to express themselves yet not missing out on the main reason they are there.
Final word
Organizing a conference requires some tips on how to pull off a very successful one. Apart from making sure that your audience doesn’t forget it in a hurry, it will be more fulfilling if you made sure they were able to connect with one another maximally. Some of them could interact and go on to collaborate on something huge. There have been true stories of people meeting their eventual spouses at a conference. That may not have happened if your conference has stringent rules concerning mingling. If you are planning a conference soon, use these tips and make it count.
