How to Use Live Polls to Engage With Your Audience?

When it comes to a corporate event, training session or any other kind of presentation there is one goal that dominates your mind – to make it attractive and engaging for your audience. You need to make it interesting for your participants to ensure success. This isn’t the easiest of tasks in the modern world where everyone at the venue carries a ‘distraction device’ a la mobile phones. If your presentation isn’t touching their hearts you can easily find people fiddling with their phones. Should a presenter try to fight against cellular distractions by asking attendees to put them away? The smarter way of engaging with your audience would be to make this very ‘distraction device’ work to your advantage.

Imagine if your audience can become active participants in your session rather than being mere listeners. You can achieve this using a live polling app. Most people at your event have questions, queries or feedback with respect to your presentation or lecture. Live polling apps offer them the perfect means to share their views and ideas. It goes a long way in empowering your audience and amplifying their voice. When your audience has the power to share their opinion it makes your event truly democratic. You will be able to gather interesting ideas that will prove to be helpful in the future.

The Art of Using Live Polling Apps
While technology is readily available and takes only a few seconds for your audience to interact with these apps on their smartphones a live polling app alone won’t ensure engagement success. You need to creatively use it to draw maximum mileage. Here are some of the things you need to keep in mind to successfully engage your audience using a live polling app –

• Choose The Right App – There are hundreds of apps available in the app stores. Not surprisingly all of them aren’t built alike. Choose an app that addresses all your needs. If you don’t need advanced polling features choose apps that come with a simple user-interface so that your audience doesn’t need to scratch their heads to use them. Lighter apps that are easy to download are more successful.
• Inform Audience About Apps - You wouldn’t like to see your audience busy trying to download and install an app when you have already started your presentation. Inform them about the use of this particular app beforehand when you invite them to the event. You can also ask them to download it before you begin your presentation. This will ensure maximum audience is on board the app.
• Don’t Confuse Your Audience – Live polling apps offer you lots of creative options. You can offer unlimited choices to your audience for a question. But you should avoid that at all costs, the reason being you shouldn’t encourage too many diverse opinions during a session as it will prove to be counterproductive. Keep it simple to encourage maximum participation from your audience.
• Avoid Too Less or Too Many – If you are using live polling apps to gather feedback from your audience too often you would turn them off. Your audience won’t be interested in responding to your polls if they see popups every few minutes. On the reverse side if you use it too sparsely during your presentation or merely at the end of it won’t help you increase engagement levels
• Don’t Make It Predictive – When things are predictive, they aren’t engaging! Hence you shouldn’t make the questions predictive in nature. Don’t set up a quiz or a poll at the end of every section of your lecture or presentation. Throw up some spontaneous polls as this will keep the audience hooked onto the edge of their seats.
• Keep Sharing Results – You aren’t using live polling apps only for the sake of using it. Once you post a question to the house and the audience have voted you need to share the results of the polls with the audience. Apps allow you to integrate the results on your presentation. Every person attending the event would know where they stand against the opinion of the house. This will make it more interesting for the audience.
• Ask Audience Feedback – Use of live polling apps during your presentation isn’t a one-time affair. You are likely to make use of these apps in the future too. At the end of your session you need to ask for feedback from your audience about their experiences with the app, its user-friendliness and if there is a scope for improvement during your future sessions. This will go a long way in making your presentations better in the future.

When you keep these things in mind you would be able to actively engage your audience using live poling apps and make your sessions engaging and productive.