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5+ Event Design Lessons for Better Engagement from Nudgestock 2021

In the very first episode of Nudgestock 2021 Rory Sutherland makes one important remark: ‘The best ideas nowadays don’t emerge within disciplines – they emerge at the intersections between them’. 

I cannot agree more. Event Psychology that I focus on, suggests just that. It lies at the intersection between creating events for people and with people, and studying people’s behavior to provide them with best experience. When event planning and psychology meet, you’ll have the most innovative ideas for increasing attendee engagement, facilitating growth, and creating meaningful experiences.

In that first session Rory makes a great point discussing if everything is BS (behavioral science, and what did you think?🙃). He says, no, one should not think BS is the only solution in every case. But –

“If you don’t use BS to expand the potential solution space to a problem, by adding a psychological dimension to the problem, in addition to other aspects or metrics you’re considering, then you’re missing out on a huge opportunity”.

Rory Sutherland / Nudgestock 2021

In other words, the best solution should almost always involve psychology. This statement really resonates with me. What I argue in context of events is exactly that: Event Psychology is not a tool that magically solves all of your event planning problems. Yet, it is an effective tool that can simplify many aspects of the event planner’s job, and improve the quality of events without requiring a huge investment.

Rory provides one terrific example. The engineers have created solar panels, a major achievement and great solution, but the problem of getting people to adopt solar panels has not been solved (and cannot be solved without an understanding of how people make decisions). In the events language: you might have figured out the best safety measures for your in-person event. Or, you might have gone above and beyond with various activities to boost engagement at your virtual event. But have you thought about how you are going to make people follow your safety rules or use the features you intended for better engagement?

On to more Nudgestock takeaways specifically for eventprofs ⬇️

Nudgestock online event
Image credit: @Nudgestocker
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Science-backed tips to fight zoom fatigue at events

Can you fight Zoom fatigue? Want to know your Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue score? Scientists to the rescue!

zoom fatigue online event
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6 Behavioral Science Books Every Event Planner Should Read

So I’ve been cooking this post for quite some time by now.  You know I firmly believe eventprofs should apply scientific insights more intentionally. For that, we need to start educating ourselves on behavioral science and psychology. One great way to do that is of course, through reading books. Below is my top 6 list of behavioral science books for event planners I highly recommend. They all are authored by renowned researchers and – this is the best part – are written for professionals from other industries and generally all interested, so they are engaging and very much fun to read.

Behavioral Science Books for Event Planners
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Nudgestock2020 takeaways for #eventprofs (summary)

This year Nudgestock festival of behavioral science took place online, and became a unique opportunity for anyone interested to hear leading experts from behavioral science and psychology fields. Naturally, I could not miss that, and it didn’t disappoint: both from content and event planning perspective it was fascinating to experience. I did 3 posts highlighting most interesting sessions in my view, and detailing my takeaways for #eventprofs community. As they were published within a couple of weeks, I thought I’d put it together as a summary so that you don’t have to search them one by one. So here we go.

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Image credit: Nudgestock.co.uk
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Using anchoring to increase (online) event ticket sales

As pricing and increasing sales for online events is currently a hot topic, I thought it’s a good time to remind about anchoring effect.


In 1974 Kahneman and Tversky did an experiment in which they first asked participants to spin a wheel containing the numbers 1 through 100 (but participants were not told that the wheel was rigged to land on either 10 or 65).  Then the scientists asked them whether the percentage of African countries that belong to the U.N. was higher or lower than the number on the wheel, and last, they asked what each participant’s own estimate of the percentage would be.

The results indicated what is now known as anchoring effect.

online event ticket sales
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3 Event Psychology Hacks (that you can use for your event today)

I have recently talked to Melanie of EventPlanningBlueprintTV about Event Psychology, and she asked me to provide 3 hacks – examples of how event psychology can help event planners in creating better event experiences.

Watch here:

Read EventPlanningBlueprintTV’s blog here.

7 tips to make the most of attending online event

For the last 2 or 3 weeks there have been a lot of articles, tips and advice on how to pivot to digital and create fantastic online event experience shared among event community. Right now, event planners are on the steep learning curve about making online events as efficient and satisfactory as possible, and oftentimes it’s not that easy as one may think. But this post is not about tips for eventprofs. Since part of my consulting is about helping event participants to attend meaningfully, I was thinking about how they feel about their event experience in these changed circumstances. It turns that it is equally uneasy for participants of our (emerging) online events to switch to this new mode and make the most out of online participation. I can clearly see it can be confusing and frustrating, partly because right now the online experiences are not ideal, and also because event participants themselves are not necessarily well familiar with technologies and virtual environment ‘rules’. So what do they need to know and do in order to adopt the new ways events are being made and adapt to it with max benefits? Here are some thoughts for online event attendees.

online event
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Live vs Virtual event amongst coronavirus outbreak: how framing can help us with this dilemma

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen large events cancelled or postponed indefinitely during the coronavirus outbreak, and most likely we’re going to see more of such cases in the near term. I think no need to describe how challenging the times are for the events industry and  – given how huge its economic and social impact of just one event can be – basically, for everybody else. I find this tweet very telling.

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There are many things that we as industry are discussing now. I recently sat with Attendify team to discuss some actionable tips from event psychology perspective, and one of the things we talked about was transition from a live event to a virtual version and some obvious practical challenges for such rapid and imposed change. I’d like to elaborate more on one of the points I made during that discussion, namely – our perception of such change.  Although to a large extent it’s true virtual can not replace live, I believe we should really re-consider how we think about it – and here is where behavioral science can help us understand how.

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