Home Meeting Planner Resources 6 Roadblocks to Building More Engaging Events

6 Roadblocks to Building More Engaging Events

August 25, 2025

Here are a few key reasons why meeting planners find it difficult to design immersive and engaging events.

Designing engaging events that participants can fully immerse themselves in is a common goal for meeting professionals these days — and for good reason. That’s what today’s participant wants and needs, and they’re not shy about complaining when an event falls short of this goal.

But it’s far from an easy task to make a truly engaging event, rather than rely on the tried-and-true traditional formats. Among the key factors that make it more challenging:

Engaging events are more complex to design. To make an event immersive and engaging, planners have to aim to engage all the senses, rather than just sight and hearing as is generally the case with traditional meeting design. They also have to find ways to excite people’s emotions and encourage interaction. This usually means finding innovative ways to use technology and carefully crafted storytelling to help attendees become part of the experience, rather than just passive observers taking in information.
People are highly distractable these days. With increasingly short attention spans and a world of entertainment literally at hand in the form of smartphones, it’s hard enough just to get their attention, much less keep them enrapt throughout an entire program.
The audience may be more diverse than ever, but they have expectations that the event will be personalized just for them. Participants walk in the door with their own unique set of learning styles, goals and preferences, which makes it extraordinarily difficult for a planner to provide personalized value while still keeping the overall program cohesive and appealing on a broader level.
Technology is great, except when it isn’t. People also come into the room with their own level of expertise with technologies like virtual reality or interactive activations — and even planners may not be familiar with all the latest engagement tools’ workings. It’s hard to keep the flow going when you have to stop and do a tech briefing first or troubleshoot user issues as they crop up (and they will). And if the tech doesn’t work for whatever reason, the devices aren’t the only things that will switch off — participants will disengage faster than you can say, “Alexa, how do I make this work?”
Building a flow that works. Ideally, attendees should find it seamless to go from session to session, with each building on the learning from the previous and no delays keeping them from getting where they need to go next. Nothing signals “disengage” to an attendee more than logistical frustrations and disconnected sessions.
Sometimes too much is not just enough. The temptation for planners — and for stakeholders in charge of approving events and their budgets — is to provide a huge volume of sessions, activities, networking events and social spaces so there are many, many reasons to want to attend. But sometimes too much is really too much and participants tune out due to option overload. The same can be true for planners who, looking to make their events more engaging and immersive, face a plethora of options and creative choices that could make it all too tempting to just say no to all of it and fall back on the familiar.

In a nutshell, to create a fully engaging event, planners need to be able to provide the perfect blend of creativity, technology, psychology and logistical precision — along with a deep comprehension of human behaviors.