Involvement
Keeping Them Engaged & Satisfied

Gone are the days when people were willing to sit and be “talked at.” Even the most famous motivational speakers no longer stand behind a podium and talk. They get their participants paricipating because they know that there are much better ways to deliver information than at live events.

If people spend their valuable time and resources getting to your location, you had better deliver something other than what they could get listening to a CD while driving down the road or on an internet streaming video. You had better create ways for them to be involved with each other, you, themselves and the material.

We are adults, and we can no longer be forced to sit quietly in our seats and listen to the teacher’s wisdom. And we don’t have to parrot that information back during tests as was true in school. We hated it back then, and we won’t stand for it now. So, you had better use interactive technology to deliver your message and information.

That’s not to say that you can’t also provide them with basic materials such as handouts, manuals, CD’s, etc. It’s important to give your participants such material. However, if your plan is to simply talk and hand out those items, you are making a big mistake. Better to just create that material and sell it over the Internet because it can be delivered by download, UPS or FedEx at a much lower cost than at an event. Your event needs to be filled with engaging, ongoing interaction and involvement if you are to succeed.

The best way to do this is by following the simple plan described in the scripting page. Blocking out your event in those chunks will keep things moving as well as provide valuable breaks, which for many people are as valuable as the formal presentations. Those breaks provide the time for networking, processing and asking questions of the presenter and other participants. They are the times where involvement is high, but there are also many other ways to create participant involvement.

The classic model is one in which participants are first provided with a learning experience usually in the form of a seemingly innocuous game or challenge. For example, if you want to teach time management, you might give an instruction before the break for the participants to be back in their seats and ready to go at 10:15.

Then, at exactly 10:15, you ring a gong and command everyone to “freeze” exactly where they are. Invariably, people will be straggling in, talking, still in the restrooms, etc.

Next, you have people observe where they are and how they feel. Then you have them process what just happened for them by writing down their actions and how they feel about the entire process.

After a few minutes of writing, you break people into dyads or small groups and have each person share for one or two minutes. Then, you ask for sharing from individuals who had some insight and would like to share it with the entire group. Only after all that has occurred is it your turn to speak / teach. Even better is to smoothly build your teaching points into the remarks of each person who shares with the group. That way you are not engaged in a long monologue, but, rather, are seen as an interconnected member of the community who is teaching.

That’s a simple example of the proven model. Have and experience, followed by processing individually, followed by processing with another person, followed by sharing with the entire group and only then are they ready for teaching. It’s very effective and efficient, and it keeps your participants highly involved and motivated. It also keeps you from being perceived (consciously or unconsciously) as just another teacher like the one that they hated in third grade.

There are numerous other methods of keeping people involved and the books by speakers talk about them. In my opinion, some of the more success include ritual, homework and elimination of distractions. All of these do however bring me back to the most important aspect of your event, keeping it experiential. You need to give participants lots of great experiences as well as the opportunities to recognize just how great those experiences were when compared what most presenters provide during their events.