Conferences are a petri dish of human behavior. Many of the social dynamics and challenges we witness in real life are intensely magnified when hundreds of people are packed into small spaces and given tight agendas. We’ve been fortunate to have the chance to launch games of H Engage at four conferences, each of which has informed a detailed record of how the application of game mechanics can influence the behaviors of individuals and social networks, in widely different environments.
In the past, we’ve been invited to conferences to help introduce benefits professionals to emerging technologies. In the same spirit, Towers Watson invited H Engage to deploy a game at IABC World Conference. Attendees could sign up and play for two days, at the end of which there was a chance to win cash prizes.
Our deployment at IABC on June 13 and 14 was an important addition to our data set, but for a reason we didn’t expect: For the first time, H Engage didn’t have a high participation rate.
We were perplexed enough to conduct a pretty extensive analysis, both qualitative and quantitative. Ultimately, we identified concepts that in retrospect seem quite obvious, but can also be very easy to miss. We believe these concepts are important for any organization that intends to roll out an initiative that involves employee engagement.
ANALYSIS RESULTS
Our analysis found that the number one determinant of whether someone signed up to play H Engage was the relationship a potential player had with the person or organization prompting him or her to join. In fact, we documented three distinct types of relationships that impacted participation in our game:
- Organizational – “I’m going to sign up for this game because an organization that has steered me right in the past asks me to”
- Peer-to-peer – “I’m going to sign-up for this game because people who I trust are doing so”
- Leadership – “I’m going to sign-up for this game because someone in a position of leadership (like a speaker on stage) asks me to”
In past conferences, we benefited from organizational and leadership relationships. For instance, at the Conference Board Employee Benefits Conferences, Kathryn Yates (Global practice leader of Towers Watson’s Communications and Change Management Practice) and Adam Wootton (head of Towers Watson’s Social Media efforts) launched H Engage during their speech on social media in health care. People joined en masse. In fact, 84% of people who signed up did so during their speech. Why did people join? Well, knowing that the game was happening certainly helped. But we believe that there were two additional drivers: Adam and Kathryn exercised the power of leadership relationships, because by being on stage presenting they were looked to as leaders by the audience. Additionally, they also exercised an organizational relationship because many in the audience were Towers Watson clients.
At IABC, we didn’t benefit from the leadership relationship because there wasn’t a moment where we could get up on stage to prompt people to join. We also didn’t benefit from much of an organizational relationship because a lower percentage of people at the conference were familiar with Towers Watson. Instead, we had to launch the game from a booth in the exhibit hall.
The only way to sign people up was one by one, when they decided to stop by the booth. We knew that signing people up individually would be tough. Many attendees never stopped by the exhibit hall, and when they did, it was during a few “high traffic” times, the duration of which we estimated to be about 2.5 hours. Using some basic assumptions (3 representatives at the booth, 5 minutes per sign up, 25% conversion rate), it was reasonable to project that we would sign up about 22 to 23 people. In fact, of 35 non-TW players, we signed up exactly 25 at the booth.
We knew that in order to achieve a high participation rate, we had to drive people to sign up each other, or said differently, the game had to go viral. To accomplish this, we added a feature for the conference where a player could earn referral points for each person he or she signed up. We even added a special prize of $150 for the player who signed up the most people.
Yet, to our chagrin, it still didn’t take off. What happened? In the words of players who tried to sign other people up:
“I tried asking the woman sitting next to me to join, and she just refused. In fact, she became increasingly weary.”
“I don’t really know anyone at the conference, so I didn’t ask people to join.”
Even with a large incentive tied to game mechanics that worked in the past, the lack of widely held peer-to-peer relationships prevented people from signing other people up. As with most conferences, there simply weren’t many existing connections between attendees.
However, there was one notable exception that proved the rule: Yvonne from Symantec, who performed the seemingly improbable task of signing up 10 people to play H Engage. How did she do it? Was she particularly outgoing? That may have been a contributing factor, but upon closer inspection, it may not surprise you to learn that 7 of the people she signed up were from her company. There’s that peer-to-peer relationship, with some leadership relationship sprinkled in (she was her team leader).
To conclude, here are the practical implications of our experience for launching any initiative:
- Honestly assess which types of relationships are your strengths. The categories we’ve presented here are probably not a bad start. You may find others that fit your organization. We would love to hear any you recommend keeping in mind in the comments below.
- Manufacture situations to amplify your strengths. In the Conference Board example above, Kathryn and Adam built upon an organizational relationship (Towers Watson) with a leadership relationship (being on stage)
- This is a bit trite, but it really can’t be said enough: Choose key metrics to measure, and then track how the decisions you’re making over time impact them. For example, in this analysis our key metric was sign-ups, and we looked at how different conference environments impacted the volume of sign-ups. If we wanted to examine consistency of play, we would look at a very different set of data.
In the end, even with the relatively low participation rate, we had a great game with a group of highly engaged players (see two of our three winners below). As Sue from Symantec put it: “Now, if benefits was only this much fun ALL the time!”
Pictured are two of our game winners. To the left, Yvonne Thomson, to the right Sue Fuller.
Do you have opinions on what we wrote here?
Were you at the conference and have some commentary to add?
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