6 Ideas for An Engaging Event Series

Whether you’re a business owner, a marketer, or an event planner, getting people to care about your events can be hard work—especially when you want to drive interest in an event series. Building an event series often relies on keeping your audience engaged during each event. Engagement helps folks feel pulled to come back again to the next one. 

There’s no better way to keep attendees engaged than by mixing in fun activities. While a deeper objective may be to present important information or teach something new, you should also ensure your audience has fun at the same time. 

Here are six creative ways to add excitement and increase engagement for your next event series.

1. Liven up your event series with a theme.

A theme can be an excellent tool for an event series. It can build community, create a consistent experience, and build relationships. Here are some examples of themes that can tie together events across a series:

• A historical period. You might have several events that are all themed around different decades or historical periods. For example, you could have a 1940s-themed event series based around classic Americana with big band music and vintage fashion.
• A favorite snack food or restaurant chain. Consider holding an event featuring one of your favorite foods at the end of each month as part of your regular event series. This will encourage guests to come back month after month for more treats!
• A travel destination (or two). Of course, who doesn’t love a tropical destination themed-event? This instantly evokes a sense of fun and can even conjure up a positive association. Mix it up and try a new far-off travel destination at each event to keep guests itching to come back. 

2. Put together a speaker series.

A speaker series is a great way to provide a variety of content for your audience. A speaker series is especially effective if you want to explore multiple facets of one topic through different perspectives. Multiple presenters can offer unique takes on a given subject. Conversations can change from week to week, giving attendees a reason to keep coming back.

When booking speakers for an event series with multiple events, consider whether each event should have its own theme or whether all events should be based around one central theme or topic. For example, if your event series is an alumni networking event, consider honoring a different graduating class or a niche area of study with each event. 

3. Bring your audience to different locations, virtually or in person.

Get your audience out of the office and into the world. Consider traveling around your city and hosting each event in the series at a different location. Guests will love the excuse to explore and mix business with pleasure.

If you’re planning a virtual event, showcase different countries via video conferencing backgrounds or themed dress codes on camera. The possibilities here are endless.

4. Combine virtual and in-person events into a series.

In this model, each event has a combination of an in-person and a virtual component. For example, a live crowd could be watching a presentation delivered via a conferencing tool, with a live Q&A after. Or, attendees who can’t make an in-person event can watch a live feed. They can interact in chat with a live, onsite moderator to feel included. 

These types of events can be hosted by a variety of different platforms (such as Facebook groups, Zoom, or Slack channels), but they should have some sort of structure or outline that stays consistent in each event in the series. 

5. Use a series as drip content delivery.

Event series are not just great for building your community–they can also be used as a delivery mechanism for any type of content you have created.

For example, if you have a course that would be valuable for your audience, you can create an event that includes the free portion of the course (typically called “the teaser”), and then offer it up at the end as part of an invitation to join the rest of your paid program.

You can also use an event series to create webinars or coaching programs around topics like mindset or goal setting.

6. Curate events for customer niches.

Curated events are unique to your business, your customers, and even you as a person. This is something that should be reflected in the events you host.

For example, if you’re a tech company and want to host an event for parents who work in the digital space, then maybe it would make sense to partner with other companies that help parents find new ways of working from home. 

When you set up these types of curations and partnerships as event series, you give yourself the opportunity to diversify your business and clientele.

Conclusion

If you think of a series as a way to deliver information or entertainment, then it becomes more than just another marketing tactic—it becomes part of your brand identity. Folks will come to rely on you for meaningful and engaging content.

To help you build a series of engaging events, The Events Calendar’s Pro 6.0 release features a new process for creating recurring events and a new post type called Series. You’ll be able to duplicate any event – single or recurring – with the same content and settings. 

Want to try it out for yourself? You can play around with these new features first in our live demo.