What is attendee engagement?

Engagement is participation, not entertainment. It is the share of attendees who do something rather than watch something, and it is a design outcome rather than a budget line.

In practice at an event

The opening session sets the norm. A live poll answered from a phone in the first five minutes establishes that this is a room where people do things, and that expectation carries into every breakout for the next two days. An opening spent on fire exits and Wi-Fi passwords establishes the opposite.

After that, the interventions that reliably work are cheap: live Q&A with upvoting, hosted topic tables at lunch with a named host, longer and fewer breaks, and one genuinely unstructured hour that is not filled.

The ones that reliably disappoint are expensive: gamification with leaderboards, scavenger hunts, and anything that rewards the attendees who were already participating.

What to look for

Measure three things and hold them across years: the share who saved a personal agenda, the share who asked or upvoted a question, and session attendance against room capacity. Total app opens is not a measure of engagement; it is a measure of how many notifications you sent.

How event67 handles it

Live Q&A with moderation, live polls, crowd reactions, session feedback, a shared photo album, an attendee directory and in-person QR connections — all in the app attendees already have, so there is no second tool to adopt.

There is no gamification: no points, no leaderboards, no challenges. That is a deliberate absence rather than a gap, on the view that a points system usually measures activity that would have happened anyway.