How to Make Your Audience Participate in Your Project

Let us guess what you do NOT like at events: a speaker who is constantly checking notes and avoiding interaction with the audience. Communication barriers can damage an event performance, a business campaign, or any other project that presupposes interaction with a target audience. Public voting is one of the proven channels to encourage active audience participation.

Why should you involve the audience into your project?

Any project communicates a message that has to be delivered to a target audience. Involving prospective clients in project development at the early stages helps verify the effectiveness of your value promise and business intention. Here are the core benefits of involving the audience in you project:

• Capture opinions, misconceptions, and preferences. Tapping into the psyche of your target persona at the initial stage of a project launch helps identify the direction that people expect from you.
• Execute a test drive. Pilot projects that are driven by a target audience help spot weak points which can be improved in the final version.
• Drive word-of-mouth. Active participation also encourages active sharing. Smart project organizers leverage public attention to drive user-generated content and encourage referrals. This way, you build anticipation for a project before the launch.

How to involve the audience in your project

Among the 100+ ways to engage your audience, picking the most resonating strategy isn’t easy. Check out the following approaches that you can experiment with to drive audience involvement:

Audience = data

Numeric data and statistics make not only great materials for extensive research but also increase credibility with the target audience. How about turning your prospective customers into data? Make a tempting announcement in which you state that everyone can make a value promise for your next project. Create questionnaires and polls to capture the views of the target audience. Based on the gained information, you can visualize a discussion map that reflects all the votes and answers. At the final stage, present your client-driven data and encourage the audience to participate in a project branding, promotion, and contests.

Live Q&A

People don’t always want to answer the questions that you ask. Encourage participatory voting in your project by setting up pre-launch, in-house sessions. Provide the attendees with event apps that have live Q&A modules and start the show. By giving speeches and involving the audience in an active discussion with project organizers, you make a crucial connection between seller and buyer.

Add action

Making an announcement and providing compelling content about the project launch isn’t enough. Ensure that none of your actions is deprived of a participation incentive. For instance, if you promote an awards show and announce that a famous celebrity will get in on the act, encourage the audience to guess who it might be. Action helps maximize public attention of your project.

Public voting

Tell your audience that they get to decide the fate of your project. Running platforms with public voting modules allows awarding a target person with the highest participation privilege. Let’s discuss this practice in more detail.

How to make your audience participate in your project through public voting

Making people a part of your story is a rewarding experience which definitely generates a lot of buzz around any project. Public voting is a proven practice used for audience evaluation of contest submissions, projects, speeches, or presentations.

So, how do you engage an audience in your project with the help of public voting? Here’s a short how-to guide:

1. Set up an event that requires a public evaluation (a project competition, a user-generated contest, an online contest that determines the best name for a project, brand, or a business, etc.).
2. Pick an online platform that allows submissions, public voting, and social media scaling on the same platform. This way you get a handy tool for viewing submitted projects, promoting them, and casting votes.
3. Advertise the outcomes. People who engage with your project through public voting will definitely anticipate the results. Make a buzzy announcement online to maximize attention as the final stage.

The reasons to use public voting for involving audience

The best decision makers are those for whom you create your project. Here are 3 undeniable reasons that you have to use public voting to involve your audience:

• Public choice theory. Just like in politics, public choice theory shows that people always make a choice in favor of their personal benefits. If people choose what’s best for them, they are going to use it in future. In the case of your project, it’s definitely a great advantage.

• Responsibility. Public voting helps you share the responsibility for a project launch with the target audience. This way, you encourage people to stick to their choices.
• Competitive spirit. The feeling of rivalry drives public dedication. By voting for a project, people get in on competition and are very supportive of their choices.

Tips on how to make your audience participation happen

Involving people into project development means proving that this activity is something they should prefer over 100+ other options. To maximize your chances for success, leverage the following tips for powerful audience participation:

• Give a strong value promise. Participation has to be rewarded. Provide a powerful value promise to encourage the involvement of your target audience and accelerate the development of your project.
• Automate public voting. No matter how enticing your offer is, the audience might miss out if some complicated actions are required to enter the game. Use an all-in-one system for event management that has simple public voting, and people won’t miss the chance to make their contribution.
• Capture data. To get the most out of your audience involvement, capture the basic contact data of your prospective clients. This will help you stretch the dialogue and generate actionable contacts.

Conclusion

Your audience is the driving force of your project’s success. Test the perks of public voting, interact with your audience on a regular basis and adjust your projects accordingly to produce a maximum impact.