How you can add interactive elements to your Digital Events

As organisers, we’re always looking to try new digital event formats which can better our show flow, create richer content and ultimately elevate the overall experience we offer our audiences. Features like QnA, reactions and chat that most streaming platforms offer, allow audiences to interact with the artists which helps create engaging virtual events that are fun, interactive and inclusive for everyone.

Engagement elements on a live event has been mostly limited to chat and QnA sessions. We wanted to build on this further and so we’ve introduced interactive mode on the product which enables an organiser to set up live event engagments on a digital event hosted across any streaming platform. You can use this to ask questions, play a game, run polls, get reactions from your audience and chat with them during the live stream.

Here’s everything you need to know about how it works, setting it up and ways you can use it.

What is the Interactive mode?

By using the interactive mode, you can add an additional layer of engagement to your event format. Publish questions, run polls, manage the leaderboard all in real time as you talk with your audience, gauge their interest level on the topic being discussed, get their thoughts and opinions and have them interact with you and your artist using the live chat feature. Set this up and use it along with any video streaming software of your choice like OBS, StreamYard etc.

How to set up the interactive mode?

For starters you’ll need to have a publisher account. If you don’t have one yet you can sign up here.

Once you’ve logged in on publish.insider.in you’ll need to get started with creating your event. It only takes a few minutes to set up.

Don’t forget to publish and take your event live on the platform by clicking on ‘Event Status’ and clicking on 'Published'

Ready to get this show on the road and start hosting?

Once you've started hosting your live stream using OBS or StreamYard, you'll need to login to your publisher account and click on 'Host Event'. Navigate to the Director's view to generate a set of streaming credentials.

Follow these three simple steps to use OBS for your interactive event on Paytm Insider.

Follow these three simple steps to use Zoom for your interactive event on Paytm Insider

Once you are LIVE, you can start publishing questions, polls and more. Watch how to set these up.

What event format is this best suited for?

Most formats really! Here’s where you can get creative! We find this feature pretty versatile and see it being used across different categories and formats of events. Of course how you choose to use it would vary greatly depending on what you are looking to get out of it.

The easiest and most obvious use case would be to set it up for your next quiz. You can publish questions to participants, assign each question a score, say 10 points, display results after each question and manage your leaderboard all in realtime.

For music gigs, the audience can request songs within the chat/comment section and you can run polls simultaneously and create the set list realtime. All this while the artist engages with the audience. Similar to taking song requests if it were a physical event.

Here’s what it looked like when Nikhil DSouza performed a few of his songs from his new EP. The audience cheered on and sent in requests.

Use it during a comedy show to take stock of what your audience thinks of the content. Get their opinions on what direction the comedian(s) can proceed with and use the audience reactions to play a game.

These are just a few examples of ways in which you can make the experience more inclusive for your audience using this engagement feature. We’re counting on you to get creative and build formats that are both fun and interactive for the artist and the audience.

Ready to get started?