Refresh and refocus your conference audience with select energising activities.

No matter the length of your conference, or the number of delegates in attendance, or even how
exciting your speakers are, there are always going to be occasions throughout your event when you will sense that the audience isn’t quite with you anymore. After all, holding a group’s attention for any length of time is no easy task!

But don’t worry. These quiet times are normal and natural, and are easily overcome with the addition of customised energisers or icebreakers: activities that help your audience to recover, refresh, and refocus their minds ready for the next presentation.

Lasting anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours, these activities can be designed by your teambuilding supplier to act as motivation for your delegates. Of course, they can be created to be in keeping with the key messages of your conference, as this will achieve maximum benefit and ensure that the time taken out of the overall schedule is not time wasted.

It is prudent, therefore, to keep in mind the profile of your audience when selecting your preferred energiser activity. For instance, something that requires a lot of physical fitness and agility may be considered inappropriate for a conference full of people who have relatively immobile jobs, whilst an activity that encourages silent contemplation or enhanced body language may not be as beneficial to, say, a conference for telephone operators, as to one for massage therapists.

The universal goal of all possible activities however is to promote interaction between your delegates, which is the key to making sure they continue to work as an effective team following the event.

The great news? There is a wide range of energiser or icebreaker activities to choose from that fit all the above criteria, and your teambuilding supplier will assist you in selecting the best for your conference.

The most popular ones tend to be those with a musical or creative impetus, such as ‘Boom Time’, a collaborative icebreaker lasting up to half-an-hour, in which delegates must work together with colourful tubes to create fast-paced music as an orchestra.

Likewise, in ‘Mexican Railway’, separate teams are asked to work together to engineer a makeshift railway track out of simple supplies, on which their train may be raced against those of other teams. Besides the obvious morale boost should their train win, each team benefits by having collaborated to create something from nothing, and competed against others with similar ventures.

Later, you may feel that an activity such as ‘Meditainment’ might be well-placed to mentally refresh your audience, with a brief interactive audio-visual relaxation experience that uses multi-sensory meditation techniques. Or, instead a simple image is all that is required to confirm each delegate’s value as part of the whole, with ‘In the Picture’ providing a reveal at the optimum time of your company logo composed entirely of cleverly-arranged individual head shots.

So, whatever your preference of energiser or icebreaker for your conference, it is important to chat to Outdoor Living – experts in teambuilding events – in advance to ensure the correct activity happens at the right time for you and your team. Contact us today to discuss energiser activities for your next conference!