Engagement lies at the heart of every successful conference. With ePosters, you have a potent tool to captivate attendees and foster meaningful interactions that will make people remember your meeting for months to come, by drawing on information they learned and conversations they had. Along with improving accessibility, increased engagement is one of the top benefits of making the switch to electronic posters from paper or fabric ‘regular’ posters.
What is Engagement?
Engagement is both a key factor in ensuring that attendees find your meeting valuable, and also a crucial metric as you assess how things went.
On site, engagement could be described as the spark that happens when someone sees a poster that makes them stop walking. Or when someone asks a follow-up question that makes everyone pause and think. Engagement is an invitation into the deep work of conferences, where conversations start, and ultimately determines the impact of your conference.
Online, engagement is a lot more data-driven because it can be measured in views, clicks, plays, and so forth. A major benefit to having all your eposters be hosted online is you get access to these detailed statistics that provide insights into what drove engagement, and what didn’t.
5 Strategies to make your ePoster event successful
So, here are the top strategies that you and your authors can take advantage of to drive engagement (both online and in person):
- Incorporate Interactive Multimedia Elements
- Do a real-time Q&A
- Promote global ePoster access
- Network, network, network
- Encourage concise and compelling poster headlines and text
ePosters allow integration of videos, animations, and interactive elements, whether a gif of an ultrasound or patient testimonial, that bring research to life. On site, video and audio clips give attendees something to do and engage hands-on with your research. Online, people interact with the materials and influence site traffic, which is then reflected in the website analytics.
Oral presentations in person or via Zoom spark insightful discussions and integrate seamlessly with a variety of event platforms. They allow authors to more thoroughly explain their findings and generate connections between researchers. Even if a talk is pre-recorded, it still gives authors the opportunity to expand upon their poster content and have a greater impact. Regardless, scheduling some time for live conversations between presenters and the audience is sure to increase engagement.
With ePosters you can extend the reach of research by giving your audience virtual access to posters before, during, and after an event. This is a huge win for people who cannot travel to conferences but still want to view and interact with the posters being presented.
When you use ePostersLive, we host your posters online for a minimum of 12 months–at no extra cost. By taking care of content management for you, we extend the longevity and accessibility of research.
This is a big one. Posters are the perfect conversation starters and often the ideal segue into an introduction or invitation to network.
Thankfully, it's never been easier to facilitate connections by allowing attendees to interact with presenters to a greater degree. The ePostersLive platform hosts comments, ratings, and also has a "Contact Presenter" button that allows people to get directly in touch with the poster author.
Better posters spark better conversations. When issuing guidelines for your poster authors, provide resources like this to give people fresh ideas. The more visually appealing a poster is, the more likely people are to read it.
Some people prefer the old-fashioned ‘wall of text’ that essentially re-purposes the abstract, others are ready to move onto a poster style that conveys the most pertinent takeaways as concisely as possible. Regardless of what you prefer, there are plenty of techniques out there to make your poster a conversation starter while maintaining all the vital information.