Improve Communications
Communication is the key to successful meetings. After all, a lot of money and effort goes into getting everyone together for an event. It is very difficult to gauge how effective a meeting has been at delivering key messages until weeks or months after the meeting is over. Often presenters overestimate their audience's level of understanding at the beginning of an event and, without a solid platform of knowledge to build on, the bulk of their content is lost on their audience. Asking questions relating to key content using audience response provides a mechanism for immediate feedback. This feedback can be used to tailor the presentation to the specific needs of an audience while there is still time to capitalize on everyone being gathered for an event.
Presenting your message is
only half of the battle.
Getting "buy-in" is the other. Using the rating and ranking capabilities of audience response, participants can prioritize key action items and arrive at a consensus. Meetings designed this way give attendees a sense of ownership in the key messages and a strong feeling that their ideas have been heard.
One of the intangible advantages to live events is the networking of people that takes place. It's that group dynamic that simply cannot be replaced with a web cast or video lecture. Audience response questions can be used as the basis for interactive team competitions. The energy created at an event where participants are competing as teams is truly memorable. The audience is motivated to pay attention to content in an effort to score well for their team during the post test. Breaking lectures up into rounds of team competition helps to keep people energized and focused.
Gain Insight
In a typical meeting environment the presenter only hears from the vocal minority. Asking targeted questions and allowing the entire audience to respond on their keypads allows a presenter to get input from everyone. Reports can even be generated based on demographic questions allowing for a more in depth analysis of responses.
Enhance Learning
Studies have shown that repetition and interaction can dramatically improve your participants' ability to retain information. Audience polling keypads provide the perfect means to achieve this repetition and interaction in small or large audiences alike. While the possibilities are limited only by your imagination, here are just a few of the ways this can be done:
- Ask "review" questions in the form of a team competition
- Pre-test your audience to target your presentation to what the audience doesn't already know
- Post-test your audience to get an immediate measurement of learning gain
- Promote interaction by gathering opinions both before and after presenting materials
- Facilitate panel discussions by allowing the audience to prioritize topics or related items
