19 Creative Ways to Engage Your Audience During COVID-19

19 Creative Ways to Engage Your Audience During COVID-19
An Article by Brands at Work

 

“Adversity is an opportunity for creativity – it forces one to dig deeper and discover something new about oneself”

Paul T. P. Wong,
Psychologist and Professor

 

For many of us, ‘business as usual’ has become ‘business as unusual’ recently, in light of the Coronavirus.

COVID-19 is having a significant effect on the meetings and events industry, even though most authorities (including the WHO) are saying there is currently no need to cancel face-to-face gatherings.

But, what if your event has already been cancelled? What if your company has enforced a travel ban, and you’re stuck at home and banished from the office? Keeping your people close is now more important than ever so how do you continue to deliver compelling communications and purposeful content to encourage conversation and collaboration in your people communities?

There’s more to life than webcasts

Look, no offence to webcasts, but they tend to turn people off. Why? Because they’re mostly one-way. Instead, why not transform your virtual meetings into live TV broadcasts, task your people with crowdsourcing your content and really make the most of your virtual conference platforms? The key is to dial up your comms to create a two-way digital dialogue.

Bring it home

Just because your people are at home doesn’t mean they can’t do things they would normally do at the office. From wellbeing programmes to learning sessions and knowledge shares, you can help your people to stay healthy, interact with others and to flex their intellectual muscles by sending a simple series of support tools – that you might even already have!

Intelligent imagination and interactivity

If your face-to-face event has been cancelled, how much of the content could you repurpose for online? Most meeting platforms allow for virtual collaboration such as video calling, screen sharing and even digital whiteboards. From inviting keynote speakers to present online, to running interactive workshops supported by collaboration apps such as sli:do, you can still make an impact on your people, with some intelligent imagination and interactivity.

When business is unusual, try unusual tactics

Working at home can be lonely – most remote workers will miss the daily contact and conversations with their colleagues. Finding ways to surprise them with a fresh piece of learning content, some creative comms around your strategy or even posting printed event materials and toolkits to their home can really raise engagement levels and bring people together. Be brave and try something new!

Want more detail?

Even though we still live for live events, we’ve created a document: ‘19 creative ways to engage during COVID-19’. It’s packed full of clever ways to engage your people, aside from face-to-face events.