Event gamification: Everything you need to know

Are you organizing or planning an event and unsure how the process works? This guide explains how to plan, promote, manage, and execute your own event while increasing participant engagement. Gamification is becoming increasingly popular and has been used for years in training and education. But have you ever heard of gamification at an event? 

Event gamification: why do it?

In concrete terms, what is gamification?

Gamificationinvolves encouraging the public to complete tasks. These tasks can be as simple as answering a question or as complex as conducting research and writing an article. The important thing is that the public commits to trying to accomplish what you ask them to do in a fun way. 
The main goal of gamification is tomake learning more fun, engaging, and effective. This module is not a new concept, but its popularity has been growing steadily since 2010. For several years now, companies have been using gamification to increase engagement with their customers and employees.

The importance of gamification in events

If you are organizing an event, conference, or convention, there are several ways to integrate gamification into your marketing strategy.
First, it is important to set goals that are in line withyour overall event marketing strategy.
Let's analyze the various benefits that make gamification worth implementing:
1. Benefit:
 
Using gamification to reward interest and loyalty creates a positive experience for your audience. It allows the audience to gain tangible benefits for the time they invest in your event.
• An audience that feels heard is more likely to be loyal to a brand. In addition, information about this target audience allows a company to better tailor its offerings and content.
• Some benefits of gamification are obvious, such as increased customer engagement and loyalty. However, thoughtful gamification can also yield more subtle and positive results depending on how it is executed.
1. Weakness

• This great potential also comes with risk. Rushed or inadequate development of your objectives can lead to an inflexible and unsuitable experience.
• When gamification backfires, it leaves your audience confused and unable to understand the value you are offering them. 

Implementation of event gamification

Awarding points for participating in events, adding leaderboards to encourage participation—gamification has been around for a while and continues to evolve.

Today, it is more sophisticated and dynamic, incorporating psychology and behavioral sciences, for example. Event gamification can be implemented in many ways, depending on the type of event and its objectives.

In addition to helping build engagement, it is also one of the most effective methods for promoting brand loyalty. In other words, the idea behind gamifying events is simple: if you make something fun, interacting with your target audience will be easier.

Gamification: Some examples

• Leaderboards: one of the most widely used forms of gamification because they are easy to implement and canencourage participation in all kinds of eventsor track a person's participation by assigning them a unique ID or badge.
• Badges of different colors can be used so that participants can see how they rank in your event.
• Badges, trophies, medals, and certificates. Most people enjoy collecting things, so why not use this to improve engagement during the event? Awarding trophies and medals for achievements during your event will allow you to segment your audience and measure their engagement rate. This will help you identify the moment that had the greatest impact on the audience. 

How can gamification add value to your events? 

 Who is your audience?
Focusing on your audience is key to determining the type of content they will find appropriate and engaging. This question is important if you are considering incorporating gamification into your event.
What motivates them?
◦ Only after you have clearly identified your audience can you determine the content of the gamification. For example, if your goal is to increase engagement, you need appropriate material. Which aspects (of this content) does your audience respond to most strongly? And how can you make it more impactful through gamification?
⚠️ However, failing to take your users' existing activity into account when developing a gamification solution can hinder the engagement you hope to encourage.

The event platform you need to adopt immediately The event platform you need to adopt immediately

With the AppCraft Events platform, bring all your tools together in one place and create a seamless digital event experience for your attendees, guests, and exhibitors. You can also seamlessly manage registrations, attendees, and content management.

Design missions, rules, and rewards.

Toboost customer engagement, a company can take several steps to develop a gamification plan that reaches its full potential.
This step in implementing a successful event involves designing missions, rules, and rewards. The rules must be clear and fair for all participants. The missions should be challenging, fun, and achievable, and can vary: 
• Unlocking badges for consuming specific content
• Sharing an image of the event on social media
These missions can be designed with different levels of difficulty so that all participants have the opportunity to win prizes based on their skill level.
Rewards, a real motivator, must be meaningful and relevant to each individual's experience.

Do you have an event to organize?

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