What does your business want to gain from your event? It’s the first question event organisers should ask themselves when deciding to plan an event. The answer for most of the business events we organise tends to be engagement around company objectives, implementing new knowledge and strategising for the future.
The key to all these objectives is to ensure the audience retains information. So, to provide a return on investment, an organiser should understand how they can best facilitate that within the framework of their event. Thankfully, there are some significant behavioural psychology theories that can be easily implemented to achieve this objective.
Conferences and meetings typically follow the format of a keynote speaker talking at an audience, but if you’ve ever heard of ‘The Learning Pyramid’, a methodology developed by National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioural Science (NTL), you’ll know information retention from this passive method sits at around 5%[1]. Spending thousands of pounds and countless hours developing content for your audience to retain just 5% doesn’t seem efficient.
As we move down the pyramid, we can see that adding audio, visual and demonstration, so think feature videos and live showcases, can increase retention to around 30%. But what many successful conferences do implement are methods that allow audience participation by group discussion, practical experiences, and teaching others, which results in around 90% knowledge retention.
These different ways of learning aren’t to be confused with ‘learning styles’, which are individual preferences to education. We often see people talk about four different styles (visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinaesthetic[2]), however this colloquialism has been disputed and numerous studies have shown that a preference does not result in more knowledge retention[3].
What we do know is that no matter how you prefer to learn, learning with a combination of elements from the Learning Pyramid, further cements knowledge retention. The reason for this is simple, you’re using different cognitive processes in your brain and storing that data in more regions[4].
Implementing knowledge retention theories
So, how can you implement these learnings into your next conference? Consider some of the following:
Turn a keynote into a conversation between a speaker and the audience. Open the floor for Q&As throughout the session or do so via an app.
Ask your audience to write down the key learnings after each session, just to keep to themselves. It’s simple, but it acknowledges the concept from a different region of the brain and boosts interconnection.
Break your attendees out into smaller teams or groups of two and ask them to create a podcast on the conference topic or key objective.
*Bonus, get them to share the voice notes and offer a prize for the best.
But above all, event organisers should offer their audiences the opportunity to take short and frequent breaks. Rushing through content doesn’t benefit concentration or retention, whilst a change of scenery and a break with nutritious brain food can help your delegates to focus on the task at hand. In this instance, less really is more when it comes to achieving a return on investment.
If you're trying to increase event audience engagement and information retention, get in touch with the team!
[1] Pushing Your Teaching Down the Learning Pyramid (scienceoutside.org) [2] Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence - Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, Robert Bjork, 2008 (sagepub.com) [3] The Stubborn Myth of “Learning Styles” - Education Next [4] Brain-based Techniques for Retention of Information | School of Medicine (llu.edu)