🥾Engagement Journeys: Key Takeaways from the 2026 Meetings & Education Summit

[5 min read] Mark Mallchok, Senior Event Strategist at Brella Productions, shared the following insights with attendees at the 2026 Meetings & Education Summit:

_{👐 Turn sessions into participation experiences}

Use workshops, group activities, interactive questions, sensory elements, and hands-on projects to vary the learning experience. Examples included a lunch passport that encouraged attendees to speak with partners and a leader-led conversation built around audience questions rather than slides alone.

_{🔁 Fight forgetting with spaced repetition}

A single event is unlikely to produce lasting retention. Reinforce learning through follow-up meetings, virtual sessions, distributed practice, and repeated engagement over weeks or months rather than concentrating everything into one day.

_{🧩 Use short learning segments}

Break complex content into smaller learning units and vary the experience every few minutes with polls, videos, speaker changes, questions, or other activities. Mark recommended keeping individual sessions generally within the 45-to-60-minute range.

_{📖 Use stories and emotion as memory anchors}

Facts may inform attendees, but stories create stronger mental and emotional associations. Curiosity, humor, surprise, and emotionally meaningful narratives can make ideas more memorable and help them resist being forgotten.

_{🙋 Turn attendees into active participants}

Participation improves engagement, connection, and retention. Simple activities—such as peer introductions, polls, group discussions, and hands-on exercises—can shift people from passively consuming content to helping create the experience.

_{📈 Extend, measure, and improve the experience}

The event should continue after the final session through virtual follow-ups, video on demand, personal reflection prompts, or other reinforcement. Afterwards, compare results with the original objectives, review analytics and feedback, and revise the design for the next event.

_{🔁 Use spaced repetition to improve retention}

Because participants forget substantial amounts of information after a session, learning should continue through follow-up meetings, virtual discussions, repeated review, and distributed practice over time rather than being compressed into one event. 

_{⭐ Make shared objectives the event’s North Star}

Identify business and participant outcomes early, then share them with agencies, production teams, AV partners, and stakeholders. Shared objectives keep the team focused, create room for relevant creative ideas, and make success measurable. 

_{☕ Protect time for recovery and connection}

Breaks should not be treated merely as schedule buffers or bio breaks. They give participants time to process information, network, and discuss what they have just learned. Mark offered a 30-90-30 model: a 30-minute morning break, a 90-minute lunch, and a 30-minute afternoon break.

_{📖 Use stories and emotion to improve retention}

Stories create stronger mental associations than isolated facts because they combine visuals, narrative, emotion, and cause-and-effect relationships. Curiosity, humor, surprise, and emotionally meaningful moments can help information stay memorable.