Why Conference Room Technology is Essential for your Next Event

An effective conference, meeting, or training session can be judged wholly by its ability to deliver information in an engaging and informative way. As well as needing captivating content for the presentation itself, a good presentation also requires vibrant visuals, loud and clear sound, and the technological capabilities and quality of the presentation should be seamless. But an effective delivery of information isn’t all about presentations: conferences also need to accommodate multi-channel communications: presentations, question-answer sessions, group discussions, group activities, virtual participation, and so forth to be truly engaging.

Conference room technology and the equipment provided are essential in achieving this. In this article, we’ll take you through all the latest technologies being involved in conference room systems, and we’ll explain exactly why their availability and functionality are so important to a conference venue. 

Audience Engagement

The engagement levels of your audience could be held up as the gold standard for any successful conference. But not everyone in your audience is stimulated to engage in the same ways. To achieve maximum engagement, a conference room needs to have the technology in place to provide information at two primary levels: visual and auditory. 

Visuals

According to the Social Sciences Research Network, a staggering 65% of the population are visual learners. While the objective of a conference may not necessarily be ‘learning’, the uptake and deep absorption of the information presented definitely is. 

The technology for your next conference needs to facilitate the presentation of visual stimuli: diagrams, videos, images, and other graphics. Christie Spaces’ conference rooms come fitted with all of the latest technologies needed to deliver effective visuals, including:

• Display Screens
• Flip-charts
• Whiteboards
• Data Projectors
• Projector Screens
• Laser Pointers

Audio

Although 65% of the population may be visual learners, this doesn’t mean that a colourful presentation is all that’s needed for meaningful engagement. All visual learners are also auditory learners to some degree, a good part of the remaining 35% of the population predominantly learns through auditory stimulation. 

Yet when it comes to auditory engagement, conference organisers are already on the back foot. This is primarily because our ability to process and remember sounds is much poorer than for other forms of sensory information. Consequently, our ability to process and remember spoken information is significantly hindered when sound quality is poor. 

There are two primary aspects that contribute to sound quality: volume and clarity.

If the sound isn’t loud enough, even by a handful of decibels, the brain needs to work harder to decipher those words being spoken. The more cognitive resources your audience spends on deciphering individual words, the fewer they have available for understanding the meaning of the overall message. It’s exactly the same issue with clarity. If the audio is crisp, the audience can focus entirely on the meaning of what’s being said without getting distracted.

This is why all of Christie Spaces conference rooms are equipped with technology to boost the volume of your presentations and to deliver them with high-fidelity. Some of the key pieces of equipment we offer include:

• Hand-held Microphones
• Lapel Microphones
• High-Fidelity Speaker Systems

Multi-Channel Communications

Communication is very rarely effective when it’s only one-way. Consequently, a conference room needs to have the technology in place to facilitate the exchange of information across a range of channels. 

Christie Spaces conference rooms facilitate groups of between 2 and 250 people, which means that the channels used in any given conference will be quite varied. 

For larger conferences, one critical issue is finding a way for audiences to interact with presenters. For this, Christie Spaces has hand-held microphones to allow for questions and information to be delivered back to presenters, while also being clear to the other attendees at the same time. 

For smaller groups, it’s often the case that multiple participants need to deliver information to the rest of the group. A major obstacle in these situations is that both time and focus are lost during the periods of interchange between different presenters. To avoid this, our projectors and display screens come ready to be hooked up to any make of personal laptop.

We also provide super-fast WiFi in all of our venues so that all participants can engage with web resources during conferences, either to practice what is being demonstrated or to engage in activities. 

Lastly, a key feature of modern conferencing practices is allowing for people to participate virtually. This is why our conference rooms come equipped with teleconferencing polycom units and Zoom-integrated display screens. 

Small Things Matter          

The final message to take home is just how much the little things like a good, functioning sound system or effective presentation equipment matter to the success and productivity of a conference. A few decibels might be the cause of ten percent of the audience tuning out, while five minutes of trying to connect a new laptop to a projector might have the same effect.

Let us take care of these little things so that you can focus on the bigger picture.