Spark Engagement Before Your Event Even Begins – Our Registrant Soup Recipe

A look into our partnered recipe with PropFuel, the perfect “appetizer” and “doggie bag” to your next virtual event “meal.” 

We are all in the habit of treating the opening session of an event as the “start,” right? Whether it’s a keynote, a high-energy introduction, or all of the above, the opening session so often carries the responsibility of setting the tone for the rest of the event, and hyping up the audience for what’s to come. 

But what if there was a way to get your participants Prepped & Primed before your event even begins? What if you were able to host authentic conversation with your community before they log into your virtual event space, or step foot in your keynote hall? We’re here to tell you there is a way. And the secret ingredient is PropFuel.

CONTINUE READING

Prepping & Priming to Make Virtual Events More Human – Join Us at our First-Ever Live Event in Matchbox Kitchen!

A look at how we joined forces with PropFuel to help Amazon’s CTA EMEA Team Day come to life.

The best dinner parties start with a personalized invitation, something that makes each guest feel special right from the beginning, but how do you do that at scale? How do you make each of 200+ guests feel special? You add a little PropFuel to the fire!

Join us at the Matchbox Kitchen Table – where every event is treated with the same care as a dinner party for your favorite guests – to talk about how a recipe for conversational engagement helped create interest, shape session design, and let us track session outcomes, all while giving each of 200+ attendees what felt like a custom experience.  

Chef Mishka talks with PropFuel Co-Founder & CEO Dave Will and Matchbox Chief Innovation Officer Tim Parsons in our inaugural Matchbox Kitchen Table. We’ll cover the creative brief for the meal, the unique challenge, and how we leveraged PropFuel’s “Registrant Soup” recipe to prep and prime the Team Day event!

CONTINUE READING

Top 5 Tips for Facilitating an Engaging, Interactive Live Virtual Gathering

Whether you’re hosting a small-scale meeting or a large-scale event, these tips will help break the ice and set a positive tone for an interactive experience for your participants.

Picture this: you’re in your tenth grade social studies class sitting behind your desk, sweaty palms clutching cue cards, tummy churning, because you are up next to give your presentation to the entire class. All eyes will be on you, staring, with only your voice to fill up the silence. ANXIETY, right?! We all remember that feeling. Thankfully, by now most of us have been given the tools to give engaging in-person presentations to an audience (even if we still get those stage-fright butterflies).

Virtual events, however, are a whole different ball game. And they are also a relatively new concept, so the world hasn’t had as much time for trial-and-error when it comes to best practices for leading discussions through your screen. Thankfully, virtual gatherings are our full-time job (literally). Check out our top 5 facilitation tips so you can effectively engage your audience!

CONTINUE READING

The Best Event Stories are Personal, Individual, and Human. Here’s How You Succeed at Gathering Them

Our Chief Innovation Officer moderated a panel session with three people who’ve mastered the art of outcome-based collaborative storytelling for Gather Voices’ Engage 2021 series. You won’t want to miss it, and it’s launching in just two weeks.

Member Engagement or Bust

A few months ago, we asked a community of registrants from an event series we hosted what aspect of their organization was in the most pressing need of problem solving. That is to say – in which area did they need more effective strategies to tackle their organizational goals. Out of four topics, a whopping 48% said their most pressing need was effective member engagement.

“Engagement” is a broad term that can mean a lot of things. But in the world of events, we’ve got you covered alongside our friends at Gather Voices. Gather Voices is a video relationship management software company designed to drive high engagement, so you can understand why a virtual event production company like us (designed to spark high engagement) would be jumping at the idea of collaborating with them.

CONTINUE READING

A Yummy Collection for Your Next Virtual Networking Venture

“Yummy” in the metaphorical sense, of course, drawn from ideas curated in our Virtual Networking Incubator.

Once a month, we spotlight a “recipe” from our Matchbox Kitchen outlining a step-by-step guide in creating an engaging virtual experience for your audience. This month is no different… except that we are breaking down a full Cookbook Collection equipped with five valuable and effective recipes curated in our Kitchen all centered around the same goal: Networking.

CONTINUE READING

Theme: A Secret Weapon in Boosting Virtual Engagement

How we bumped participant excitement up a notch (or many) by incorporating theme into our internal employee engagement retreat.

As a virtual event production company with a fully remote team, we frequently have the opportunity to test new engagement tools and techniques in company gatherings. We figure out what works and what doesn’t, but sometimes something extraordinary happens: we come across a gold mine. Our Special Projects Retreat was a prime example of a gold mine that resulted in discovery that we can directly and confidently recommend to our clients.

CONTINUE READING