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Projectory mediator Jeffrey Rogers leads the opening Main Stage session at CEMA Summit in August. Participants used balloons to vote on answers to a series of questions. (Whatever Media Group photos)
If you walked in on the opening Main Stage presentation at CEMA Summit, held Aug. 4-6 at the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit building, you might have thought the corporate event marketers in attendance were celebrating a colleague’s birthday. They were laughing and looking toward the ceiling at dozens of balloons floating above the round tables where they were seated.
One person at each table was manipulating the helium-filled balloons suspended with fishing line up and down with a crank device as a way to indicate responses to multiple-choice questions raised by Jeffrey Rogers. Rogers is a facilitator from event experience company Projectory, whose mission is to infuse excitement and joy into event sessions with uplifting formats.
The “floating opinions” format is a fun way to address business issues, Projectory cofounder Oren Berkovich told Convene. The CEMA audience embraced the balloon voting — an analog alternative to measuring the room’s sentiment, usually achieved via standard online polling tools that aggregate responses and publish them in real time on the big screen. Plus, the novel approach lightened the atmosphere to help foster meaningful discussion about the ups and downs of events industry trends.
Curt Wagner is digital editor at Convene.
Taylor Fry, director of national accounts at the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, watches a balloon rise and fall as he turns the crank attached to it by a fishing line.
There are a thousand ways that we could have [participants] register their opinions. Almost all of them are entirely joyless. They don’t need another app. Sometimes it’s fun to do things a little bit analog and make it a little bit more interesting.”