{"id":55159,"date":"2022-09-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-01T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newrcblog.wpengine.com\/us\/en\/blog\/?p=55159"},"modified":"2025-03-13T06:58:45","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T13:58:45","slug":"engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/us\/en\/blog\/engagement\/","title":{"rendered":"The evolution of event engagement: How to create deeply engaging experiences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hopin is now RingCentral Events.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nearly half of event professionals<\/a> claim engagement is the biggest contributor to their success and<\/em> their greatest challenge. This begs the question: Do we really understand how to engage an audience?<\/p>\n

We may know engagement when we see it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that book you can\u2019t put down.<\/p>\n

That all-night conversation with a person you can\u2019t get enough of.<\/p>\n

That teacher whose class you actually want to attend.<\/p>\n

That three-hour movie that left you barely blinking. (Or better yet, that 10-episode Netflix show you devoured with the determination only someone who\u2019s truly engaged can muster.)<\/p>\n

When you get right down to it, it\u2019s like we\u2019re spending our lives peering around the corner, looking for that next thing \u2014 that person, that content, that moment \u2014 that will make us feel truly engaged.<\/p>\n

So why can\u2019t we get people to engage with an hour-long webinar in the same way? With the same dedicated attention span? With the same feverish fervor?<\/p>\n

The simple answer is we\u2019ve been led to believe authentic engagement can be easily hacked when (spoiler alert) it can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Just as an immersive movie-watching experience comes only after a bevy of Hollywood professionals have worked their magic on scripts, costumes, and cinematography, a deeply engaging event requires expertise and engineering.<\/p>\n

In this guide, we\u2019ll explore how to build engaging experiences today \u2014 but first, we\u2019ll look back at how engagement has evolved over time.<\/p>\n

In this guide:<\/h2>\n

What the hell is engagement, anyway?<\/a>\u200d<\/a><\/p>\n

How \u2018engagement\u2019 lost all meaning<\/a>\u200d<\/a><\/p>\n

The new standards of engagement<\/a>\u200d<\/a><\/p>\n

The new tools of engagement<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

What the hell is engagement, anyway?<\/h2>\n

Merriam-Webster defines engagement<\/a> as \u201cemotional involvement or commitment\u201d and \u201cthe state of being in gear.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a deeper dive, we turned to engagement consultant Scott Gould. Scott is the author of \u201cThe Shape of Engagement<\/a>\u201d and has been building shared experiences since he was 16.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s you, and there\u2019s me,\u201d Scott explains. \u201cAs long as we remain separate and unaware of each other, we\u2019re unengaged. Imagine a Venn diagram with a circle of you and a circle of me. If those circles overlap, we\u2019re now engaged. The sense of \u2018we\u2019 transcends you and me \u2013\u2013 that\u2019s engagement. It\u2019s essentially togetherness.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, engagement is a relationship. And while that definition might sound fairly simple, as any event organizer will tell you, it\u2019s the process<\/em> of engaging people that\u2019s the real challenge.<\/p>\n

After all, engineering engagement, particularly at events or meetings, is rarely a happy accident. It\u2019s a layered and often loaded topic.<\/p>\n

The many layers of engagement<\/h3>\n

Professionals across a potpourri of industries have long been trying to better understand engagement and how to do it right \u2013\u2013 particularly in our complex, tech-laden world where there\u2019s no shortage of experiences, people, and content crying out for you to engage with them. (More on this in a minute.)<\/p>\n

The bottom line is there aren\u2019t any shortcuts because engagement is more than skin deep.<\/p>\n

Scott has a three-part framework for understanding the different psychological states of engagement:<\/p>\n