You did it! People RSVP’d to your event or conference last year, but you noticed their satisfaction was dwindling… and it was only Day 2. If you think the traditional 45-minute keynote speeches with a hundred slides were partly the culprit, you’re probably right.
For your next event, your challenge is to come up with varied sessions that keep your attendees' bodies and minds present. You’ll also want activities that bring out their creative, passionate, and curious selves.
We compiled the best interactive conference session ideas so you can choose what matches your event’s energy and objectives. From easy (minimal setup) to intense (takes some time and resources but with significant returns), you won’t run out of ideas to engage your attendees.
Why should you care about maximising engagement? Highly engaged attendees are most likely to retain information, form stronger connections with your brand, and report higher satisfaction. Ultimately, this provides valuable insights into your audience and leads to better business outcomes, including increased conversion rates and improved customer loyalty.
Let’s dive into your options.
Start strong with this harmless icebreaker game. Here, one person shares three statements about themself, something, or someone—two that are true and one that’s false. Then, by taking a one-item quiz or voting on a quick poll, the audience guesses which statement is the lie.
Best for: Introducing a speaker or panellist before a session, or getting breakout participants to know each other in a quick, lighthearted way.
Launch a quiz or assessment in Polls in seconds and let the audience choose which statement about the speaker is a lie
Tickle your attendees’ minds and tap into their competitive spirit. Pick a common trivia category, such as sports or pop culture, but mix things up by adding easy, moderate, and difficult questions. To boost participation, offer a small prize to the top scorers.
Best for: Filling natural breaks during the event. The mini trivia game is a simple way to let participants enjoy themselves, like when you attend a pub quiz with friends.
⏰ No time to research questions? We gathered over 100 sports trivia in one place, so you won’t have to look elsewhere. Simply copy-paste the questions you like to your slides or build your first or nth quiz on Pigeonhole Live.
Ever heard of participant-driven sessions? OST tops the list in this category.
Open Space Technology is a method of gathering that doesn’t require planning, a detailed agenda, and lots of event materials. It focuses on a central theme, usually a complex problem for which a group of people commits to find a solution together.
For instance, a non-profit organisation may host an OST to inspire long-term plans and actions for a vulnerable community.
Best for: Bringing together experts from diverse backgrounds, such as engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and marketers. You’ll need a venue big enough to accommodate these like-minded individuals. Ask them to set the day’s agenda using a word cloud or open-ended poll and choose the sessions they want to contribute to.
If you want an OST-like event for professionals in the same industry, an unconference offers the same flexibility. It begins with the attendees deciding on the agenda—which topics and activities do they want to tackle? Typically, the ones who suggested the most popular concepts will lead their respective sessions.
Best for: Promoting spontaneous, peer-to-peer learning. With a similar setup to Open Space Technology, an unconference surfaces ideas and issues that matter most to your participants, allowing them to work out plans and solutions.
👉 Try this: Use our word cloud to instantly see topics that resonate with your attendees. Or create an open-ended poll so participants can submit their thoughts and vote on others.
Word clouds offer beautiful visualisation of OST and unconference topic ideas
Lightning talks are the perfect choice if you’re considering compact sessions. This series of fast (but not furious; only insightful) presentations lets each speaker discuss a topic in 5 to 7 minutes. This should be enough to convey two to three insights with brief examples and a clear call-to-action (CTA).
Best for: Sparking conversations and keeping attendees engaged. The goal here is to inspire, share insights, and enlighten. But a good lightning talk also doesn’t shy away from being thought-provoking or controversial.
Ignite is the fast-and-furious version of the lightning talk. Here, the presenter gets 5 minutes to speak but can only use 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s considered more of a performance than a lecture, which could just be what you need to jazz things up at your next conference.
Best for: Offering a many-to-one networking option to leaders, experts, and their target audience. It’s different from what most conference-goers are used to, which can pique their curiosity and drive more interactions.
PechaKucha almost follows the same rules as Ignite, except for two main things. It expands on ‘show, don’t tell’ by allowing the speaker to show an image (instead of reading the text) on each of the 20 slides and tell the story behind it for 20 seconds.
Best for: Sprinkling some visual storytelling in an evening session or whenever you need to energise the room. PechaKucha 20x20 works well for certain industry conferences such as those focused on architecture, design, technology, and real estate.
Prepare a short quiz based on the content presented during the event. Use an audience interaction tool like Pigeonhole Live to display the questions on the big screen while attendees answer in real time via their mobile devices.
Best for: Injecting an interactive element at key moments, such as kicking off the afternoon session or after the two major keynotes. Don’t let speakers off the hook—encourage them to participate, too!
👋 Need to create a quiz now? Check out our Help Centre to learn how to design an interactive quiz.
A soapbox session carves out a space for participants to give short, impromptu speeches on a topic they’re passionate about. You can set up an open mic or soapbox area where they can sign up for speaking slots. This enables individuals or groups to gather immediate feedback or get a particular message across to the right audience.
Best for: Spotlighting different stories, ideas, and challenges. This format is ideal for an arts festival where people can perform their new or unfinished piece, or a sustainability event where advocates can bring a critical issue to light.
Think about focus group discussions, but less formal, with participants sitting as if around a campfire. This small group session doesn’t even have a formal speaker. Instead, a facilitator starts with a broad question or statement, allowing the conversation to evolve naturally.
Best for: Designing breakout sessions that remain open for those who may want to join or leave anytime. Besides comfortable seating, a campfire setup doesn’t require much else. This means you can forgo the slides or booking individual meeting rooms—although it might help to set up a standup flat-screen monitor.
Invite a small yet diverse group of industry leaders and field experts to a business roundtable, engaging them in an open dialogue on a specific topic related to your conference’s theme. Assign a moderator to guide the discussion while the members deep-dive into crucial subjects.
Best for: Showing tangible results at a conference. Your designated leaders and experts can plot a course of action after considering a topic from various angles and perspectives. Later, they can present their output to the rest of the attendees in a live Q&A session.
💡 Pro tip: Ditch the traditional Q&A where attendees must pass on the mic or walk agonisingly towards it near the stage. A quicker and stress-free way to collect questions is to have your audience type them on their smartphones. You can also enable them to upvote or comment on other people’s queries so you can display the top-voted ones on the big screen.
Let your attendees benefit from their own collective knowledge. Create a relaxed, café-style environment where they can sit together in small groups. Each table explores a different topic or question, with participants rotating to a new table after a set time.
Best for: Giving people the freedom to formulate their own takeaways. This powerful sense-making tool can make your event more meaningful—and thus memorable—for the participants.
In the human spectrogram, attendees reveal their opinions or experiences on certain topics. To start, put a long piece of coloured tape on the floor. Ask attendees a range of questions and tell them to position themselves along the line, which represents a continuum between two answers (e.g. ‘Strongly agree’ and ‘Strongly disagree,' 'Very comfortable' and 'Not comfortable at all').
Best for: Helping attendees find others who share common or different views. The human spectrogram is useful as an energiser or discussion starter in breakout rooms.
✋ No space for a long coloured tape? Pigeonhole Live’s rating polls can help you achieve the same results with icon, numeric, and draggable polls.
The solution room is a peer-to-peer coaching session where participants help each other solve their most-pressing problems. It starts with grouping individuals based on their expertise—you can gauge this using the human spectrogram. Then, individuals talk about their challenges and receive advice and support from their table peers.
Best for: Enhancing interaction and creativity in individual participants. This session's consultative style empowers people to speak up and make the most of their time at your event.
Braindate is the flagship product of the peer learning platform e180. It’s a structured one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many networking session that matches attendees based on their interests or expertise via a dedicated app.
Best for: Scheduling time for people to meet during the event to discuss their chosen topics. According to e180, someone from your network can have the answer to your burning questions or problems. This method helps you connect to the right resource.
In this type of small group discussion, more individuals get a chance to speak up. Kicking off with a particular topic, participants ‘tag’ each other in and out of the conversation. Whenever someone is ready to share their perspective, they tag one of the current speakers to step out by, say, tapping on their shoulder.
Best for: Bolstering diversity and inclusivity while keeping things lively. This approach allows for multiple perspectives, especially when you’re tackling a cross-disciplinary or multi-faceted issue.
Break a large group into two circles: inner and outer. Inner-circle participants discuss a topic while the rest of the group listens. Leave an empty seat in the inner circle so that outer-circle participants can step into it and join the discussion. An existing participant in the inner circle then voluntarily steps out.
Best for: Tapping more people to speak in a large group. Fishbowl discussions are also a proven way to promote active listening and inspire thoughtful contributions from your attendees.
Divide participants into groups, each focusing on a different aspect of a larger topic. Reassemble them later and have the group representatives share their findings—the ‘puzzle pieces'—while encouraging the entire room to piece together the full picture.
Best for: Breaking down complex subjects into manageable parts so the participants can better understand the whole. A jigsaw session is also effective for events where the goal is to integrate diverse viewpoints or findings into a coherent understanding of a larger issue.
💻 Hosting a hybrid or virtual event? It’s easier than ever to engage virtual participants no matter where they are in the world.
With video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex, you can start your jigsaw session in an online room and later send everyone to breakout rooms. The smaller groups can then use the in-app whiteboard or an external option like Miro to map their thoughts.
And, when you reconvene, switch to integrations like Pigeonhole Live to collect people’s sentiments in a word cloud before you proceed with the presentations.
Encourage participants to discuss and defend their viewpoints, like in a debate. Give them time to prepare their stand on a thought-provoking or polarising topic, something like pineapple on pizza 😉. Ensure the topic is related to your event.
Best for: Exploring controversial or complex issues from multiple viewpoints. The debate club is suitable for academic, policy and governance, leadership, and industry-specific conferences.
Conduct a pitch contest where pre-selected participants pitch their ideas or products to a panel of judges a la Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank. You’ll need to ramp up registration for slots early. On the day itself, your judges (who could also be from your roster of speakers) provide feedback, and the audience can vote for their favourite pitch.
Best for: Highlighting innovative ideas while fostering the entrepreneurial spirit. This format is ideal for startup conferences and innovation summits where you showcase real-world solutions to the audience, spotlight emerging talents, and create a competitive yet supportive environment for all.
📊 Want to generate a live poll for your pitch competition? A multiple-choice poll is your best bet for an activity like this. You can set it up before the event to ensure you’re not leaving out any contestants. After the pitch, you can ask the audience to scan a QR code so they can enter the poll and vote for the idea they like the most.
You’ve probably seen this before in a global event like a United Nations (UN) conference: attendees wear wireless headphones while a speaker delivers their presentations. You’ll find yourself in a similar scenario in a silent disco. Only this time, you can switch between multiple speakers to listen to the one you’re most interested in.
Best for: Conducting breakout talks that happen in the same place. If you have a diverse delegation like the UN, you can also offer keynote speeches in multiple languages (simultaneous interpretation).
❗ Did you know you can now afford to have simultaneous interpretation at your event? Live translation service providers like Interprefy have made simultaneous or signed language interpretation accessible to event organisers. Interprefy partners with world-leading teams of conference interpreters to help you achieve a truly global reach.f
To ensure every voice is heard in a speaker Q&A or small group discussion, you must consider those who may be shy or hesitant to speak publicly. One quick and effective way to boost their confidence is to ask them to submit their ideas or questions anonymously using a digital platform. Collect and divide by theme so the group can discuss the most popular or exciting topics.
Best for: Facilitating sessions where you need candid insights or feedback, as anonymity allows participants to share their genuine thoughts without fear of judgement.
Close the event with a brief self-reflection. Provide prompts or guide questions to enable participants to reflect on their conference experience. Then, give them the option to share their insights in pairs or small groups.
Best for: Ending your event with an opportunity for attendees to tie their learnings to specific aspects of their lives or careers. The subsequent sharing allows for even deeper connections and a heightened sense of camaraderie.
Take advantage of the latest interactive technology to ensure a smooth-running event. Here are three must-have tools and platforms to boost the creative energy in your in-person conference:
To make the most out of your interactive conference sessions, it's essential to keep a few best practices in mind. Here's how to ensure your sessions are engaging, productive, and memorable:
Ready to boost engagement? Create positive memories with these interactive conference session ideas and tips. By incorporating these strategies, you'll ensure your event stands out and leaves a lasting impact on your attendees.
Create engaging, memorable experiences for your attendees with Pigeonhole Live
An interactive session at a conference is one where attendees actively participate instead of just sitting and listening. This can include games, discussions, or hands-on activities that make the experience more engaging and memorable. The aim is to create a deeper connection with the content and encourage networking and learning among participants.
Mix up session formats to keep things fresh and engaging. Start with icebreakers to help attendees feel at ease, then use quizzes to add a fun challenge. Use methods such as roundtable and fishbowl discussions to encourage in-depth conversations. Adding tech tools for live polling and Q&A can also keep interactions dynamic.
Here’s a list of interactive conference session ideas, grouped into several categories:
Icebreakers and energisers
Collaborative discussions
Interactive presentation formats