Give presenters/facilitators something useful: Send them our Enhancing Your Presentations White Paper, the bible for preparing for an interactive meeting.
Help your speakers prepare to use interactive audience response technology with these easy tips:
- Ask Purposeful Questions. There should be a clear purpose for every question you ask. Some examples: "...it will get my audience thinking about..", "...it will allow everyone to know what we all believe about...", "...it will tell us where the most interest lies...", "...it will tell me (and them) what they don't understand about...".
- Ask Meaningful Questions. There is nothing better than a question where the participants are just as interested in seeing the results as you are. All too often questions are of interest to the presenter, but of marginal interest to the audience.
- Be Ready for all Possible Results. One way to know if you are asking truly interesting questions is that you can't really predict how the results will turn out. What will you do with or say about the results if...(a) most everyone responds the same way, (b) about an equal number picked each choice, (c) responses are polarized.
- Acknowledge Audience Polling Results. Discuss the results with your participants; even though everyone sees the same data, many interpret it differently. In small groups, ask participants to interpret what they see. The cardinal sin is to ask your participants a question, then proceed as though you never asked.
- Break Down the Data by Demographic Category. Showing poll results separately for different demographic categories is often the interesting, and most powerful thing you can do. Participants assign themselves to demographic categories through the audience response systems. Then, the results of a poll can be shown separately for each category (e.g., females vs. males, marketing vs. sales, etc.).
- Keep Questions Verbally Short and Conceptually Simple. Long or complicated questions simply take participants a long time to understand and respond to. For a given audience, questions should be intuitively obvious and the audience response choices need to be just as clear.
- Rehearse...At Least a Little. Get a sense of timing...it takes 15-30 seconds to collect audience responses and various on-screen prompts tell you how many have come in. Know when you intend to cut of audience polling and show the results...it is usually not a good idea to wait for every participant to respond.
Results can be presented in a variety of ways. Make sure they are presented in a way both you and your audience can understand. If you intend to use on-the-fly questions, know what it takes. If you intend to show demographic breakdowns of the polling data, know what can be done.
- Don't Overuse Audience Polling, Especially when Repeating the Same Methods. Like anything else, too much a good thing ends up not being good at all. Use a variety of methods to keep audience polling fresh.
- Use Familiar Methods. Use the same audience response choices as much as you can. Use scales that are familiar to your participants. Use scales where high numbers have a positive valence (e.g., 1=terrible...5=fantastic).
- Keep the Polling Screens Clean. Optimize the signal-to-noise ratio. Don't use unnecessary screen elements and backgrounds or colors that make the question and results hard to see.
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