The OpenWater Blog

3 Strategies for Ongoing Attendee Engagement After the Conference

When you throw a really great conference, attendees are likely to leave feeling great about the content and the new knowledge they’ve attained. In the weeks that follow, they’re likely to think about what they’ve learned and think of ways they can apply it to their own organizations and businesses. They get excited to bring up new ideas to their colleagues and to enact change.

There’s just one little problem: The more time that passes, the less engagement there is.

Ideas often become a bit fuzzy and attendees will fall back into their routines. However, part of what makes for a successful organization is a prevalence in the minds of attendees long after the conference ends. And, truth be told, there’s no reason for engagement to end with the conference.

You don’t want to leave ROI on the table and that being said, here are 3 strategies you should rely on for post-conference engagement.

Archive Content and Make it Available After the Conference

As we discussed in the article regarding providing greater value at events, making content accessible after the conference is important. After all, attendees may take notes during the conference but they are unlikely to remember everything as sharply as they did in the days and weeks that followed the more time that passes.

By putting content on a website, attendees can make use of certain speeches or sessions long after your event has ended. This also serves as a resource your organization can rely on to curate content for blog posts or other marketing materials throughout the year.

Host a Post-Conference Discussion

While discussion is vital at the conference, it doesn’t have to end with the conference either. In fact, attendees are likely to benefit from discussions with one another because they’re coming from different perspectives and have different needs.

A post-conference online discussion group – even just a Facebook group – is a great way to provide a platform where attendees can discuss speakers and topics in greater detail as they apply concepts to their own organizational needs. Most importantly, this is a great platform for speakers to interact with attendees and answer any follow-up questions that may have gotten lost in the shuffle of the live conference.

Repurpose Content Into Marketing Materials

One of the greatest challenges for any conference manager is to maintain activity for the organization following the conference. And, while doing so seems difficult, it isn’t if you rely on the ample amount of content from the conference to create blog posts, infographics, interviews, videos, or other materials.

It’s a win-win situation: Attendees receive the content they want and your organization receives visibility in the off-season from the conference.

Attendee Engagement Never Has to End With Your Conference

Because planning and executing an abstracts conference is a full-time job, it’s difficult to plan for what will happen after the conference as well. However, by taking simple steps like archiving content and making it available or even turning speaker content into other marketing materials, you can increase engagement and keep attendees involved with your organization. The best part about doing so is that this makes it simpler to recruit members to return in following years as well.

With so many ways to engage attendees, it doesn’t have to be difficult to keep your organization visible. And, by following the simple strategies above, visibility and future success is simpler than you think!

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