Event Planners: Captivate by Design

Published August 13, 2013 | By ncmarsh

Event Planners: Captivate by Design

Nathan Coe Marsh

In planning an event, how can you build anticipation, fascination, and engagement into the very DNA of your program?

As a corporate entertainer I’ve performed for tens of thousands, I’ve also spent years studying the masters of audience engagement — from vaudeville comics to televangelists, from civil rights leaders to Billy Mays — they each learned, for very different reasons, to captivate an audience. They had two basic sets of tools: the tools of the performer (voice, naturalness, rhythm, charisma) and an understanding, whether formal or instinctual, of the structure of engaging presentation.

It is this second prong that is most practical for event planners. How do you structure and develop your program to grab your audience and insure the most effective program possible?

An effective presentation brings an audience through four distinct emotional phases:

1. Attention
2. Rapport
3. Climax
4. Release and Reconnection

We find these four basic phases, in this sequence, in nearly every engaging presentation — it’s in Shakespeare, in Law & Order, and in the structure of the shows of great entertainers.

Over the next four articles we’ll take a look at each phase, and give you the tools to apply the structure to create more captivating events that generate more repeat registrations.

The Best is Yet to come!