Blog - Page 2 of 8 - Matey Events

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.

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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.

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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3 things that make Toolkit event memorable

I attended the first edition of Toolkit event yesterday, and would like to share 3 things that are, among others, to make it memorable for attendees. As you can imagine – all 3 are rooted in science.

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Dare to Be Different [with your event design]

How one psychological experiment and your event design are linked

What’s it all about with ‘dare to be different’ when it comes to event design? Let me tell you about an infamous experiment that Hedwigg von Restorff did in 1933; she discovered an effect which was eventually named after her (“von Restorff effect” or “isolation” effect). She handed participants of the study a sheet of paper with sets of letters on it. It was completely random sets of three letters each, which at some point included a set of numbers. So it looked like that:

bgu, dwa, pkl, 396, yft, jyo

And then she asked them to recall the items.

An amazing finding of the study (which has since been widely leveraged) was that people were much more likely to remember the items that were different from the rest (in this case it was a set of three numbers, but further research showed that is true for whatever stands out).

What we can learn from it

That made me think that oftentimes, when planning an event, we copy what others do. We don’t dare to be different. I guess the reasons are a) we follow the trends b) we want to improve our own event by implementing the best practices c) we fall victim to status-quo: if something has proved to be working well, why change that?

And it seems to be reasonable – at least, two of the reasons are pretty justifiable. Yet, the isolation effect shows us that to really stand out and get stick in one’s memory – which is the primary reason why attendees would come back to your event – we don’t need to be exactly better than competitors. While fine-tuning and improving event design is no doubt what we want to pursue, to make a difference we would need to do something differently. Musical keynote? Fascinatingly weird topics? Stunning concept? Leveraging event psychology tools to provide a lasting impact? There are many ways to get in the spotlight and most important, stay there. As Sally Hogshead famously put it, ‘different is better than better’.

In the context of our industry – I’d say, the goal is not to get better in designing events, but to do it differently.

Would you dare to be different?

Win competition by creating event’s psychological value

I’ve recently become a fan of podcasting. I’ve resisted it for a long time because I am not an audio person, so listening to audiobooks is not my cup of tea. But the starting driving force for me was that I haven’t been able to get much time to read over recently, and I have been travelling more. That’s how I decided to give podcasts a try – and since then got addicted.

Of course, it’s a whole ocean of various shows and hosts, and topics, and one needs to learn how to swim in it. There is a lot of garbage just like it is in the ocean, too, and one needs to sort through it to find those pearls that would bring joy. Ok, so in short, podcasts are great source of knowledge, inspiration, fun – and now I am enjoying it. At the end of this post I am going to share my favorites; one of the best things about them is that they are not highly specialized or too narrowed to discuss specific subjects. Life has so many facets everyone of us can be interested about simultaneously, and if I can learn and laugh, or learn about one field and get it applied to my own – that’s exactly what I look for.

Well, but how does it all relate to this blog’s headline though? Read on.

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One major way to make your event impactful

All right, so IMEX America 2019 is now over, and I’d like to share how it was (Spoiler: it was awesome 🙂 )

First, of course – I got to speak about #eventpsychology! While I was already very excited about the opportunity to share insights on applying psychology and neuroscience to events with fellow eventprofs, I got even more excited when I saw a packed seminar room with people even standing around. That gave me some goosebumps! Event community’s interest in the topic has been definitely growing. I can say that from what I see shared online; from my very own session experience; and by looking at IMEX agenda where quite a number of similar topics have been included this year (e.g. measurement of emotions; improvement of learning and networking experience based on science, etc).

Second, I’d like to share three cool things I’ve got to experience first hand at IMEX which – no wonder – are highly related to my favourite subject above and in particular, to the concept of engagement I talked – among other things – during my presentation. Find out what these 3 things are:

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Are we ready for event neuroscientists?

I listened to Rodger Dooley’s podcast with Tedi Asher, the first and only museum neuroscientist, and it made me think about the parallels between museums and event planning as well as adoption of neuroscience and psychology in the events world.