Engaging your audience

It’s not what you say, but how you say it.

Let’s be honest, congresses, conferences and similar events are about so much more than “next slide please”. At heart, they’re about three things: sharing knowledge, building networks and creating a sense of community. Done right, these elements don’t just coexist—they work in synergy.

But here’s the catch: none of that good stuff happens if your audience has checked out before you’ve even got to the keynote. In an age where attention is a currency that’s increasingly hard to hold on to, how you deliver your content matters more than ever.

So, how do you make it land?

You get creative.

A strong, cohesive theme is the spine of your event. It gives structure and pulls everything together into one clear and memorable entity. Without it, you’re left with a series of disconnected sessions, each doing their own thing, jostling for attention and making the day feel disjointed.

You want your audience to connect with the bigger picture—each session should add a brushstroke to the same canvas, not feel like it belongs in a different painting.

Nobody enjoys being talked at; it’s way more fun to be part of the action. Plan your agenda around segments. The punchier, more varied and full of surprise they are, the better.

And don’t forget that narrative thread. People are far more likely to get stuck in when they understand the why behind what they’re being asked to do. Active participants > passive listeners. Create partnerships.

Brutal as it sounds, people forget most of what they hear at conferences. Information retention during passive formats is low—like, 10–25% of key messages from a full-day event low—and even then, that’s only if the ideas are clearly structured and reinforced.

Research also suggests that retention starts to nosedive after around 45–60 minutes of high-density content. So, strip it back! Focus on a few big ideas and find ways to reinforce them. Schedule breaks, let your audience get hands-on and watch their retention skyrocket.

Time for some science. Humour isn’t just about fleeting laughter—dopamine is proven to boost memory. A healthy dose of fun turbocharges our engagement with the content and increases the staying power of the message behind it.

It doesn’t have to be silly; it just has to be human. Whether it’s something witty or simply moment that makes people smile, it all works. Make your audience feel something. Ideally, joy.

Congresses bring together all sorts. Different people turn up looking for different things, which is yet another reason why how you deliver your message matters as much as what you say.

Shared cultural formats are a great way of connecting with a broad and varied crowd. Could your message be worked into a fun and relatable format, like a gameshow or chat show? Make it bite-sized and impossible to skip past—when the delivery feels fresh and exciting, people are more likely to tune in.

The crux of it is: you can’t expect people to listen if you’re not speaking in an interesting way. Your audience’s experience has to be top of the bill, even if it means having to rethink your delivery.

You can’t rely on just getting attention; you have to go out of your way to earn it. That means not doing the same old stuff that everyone else is. Instead of just presenting your message, give it production value. That way, your audience will still be thinking about it months down the line.

When a client asked us to dial up the energy and bring a sense of cohesion to their section of a wider meeting, we knew we had to give them something out of the ordinary.

Inspired by daytime TV, we created The Morning Show—a peppy and entertaining format complete with its own branding, credits, theme music and stings. We even had our ‘stage manager’ hype up the studio audience to get them fully on board with the concept before the cameras started rolling.

Instead of sessions, we ran segments which our live host pulled together into one dynamic package. Each segment, while unmistakably on theme, delivered something different:

The result? Rave reviews, enthusiastic engagement and a client who’s already thinking about The Morning Show episode 2.

Ready to make your next conference unmissable? Let’s chat engagement.