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. 

Why Polling Apps Are The Future of Elections?

Technology has completely changed our lives in the last 100 years and more so perhaps in the last two decades. We don’t shop for our groceries the way we did in the 90s, we don’t communicate like we did in the past and when it comes to acquiring knowledge Internet has brought a sea change in the way we learn. It may sound ironical but we still vote the way our grandfathers and even great grandfathers did! Somehow ballot based elections have refused to yield space to more sophisticated and convenient ways of conducting elections. But it’s longer than expected reign is about to end as polling apps would soon become core technology in future elections.

Breaking Barriers  
  
There has been much resistance against use of technology when it comes to elections. Believers in different political ideologies are surprisingly on the same page in their opposition to use of voting apps for elections. The chance of hacking and other forms of sabotage is often cited as the reason behind the opposition. This criticism is unfounded given the fact that technology when implemented with the right set of safeguards is more secured than any manual process we have ever known. For instance nobody criticizes electronic payment anymore while this form of payment attracted equal criticism in the past. Similarly a real time voting app can easily be implemented with strict security protocols to prevent unauthorized access and misuse.

Increasing Participation and Faster Results     

Use of polling apps in elections offers two major benefits over the conventional polling process that makes use of ballot papers. First voters are no longer required to visit polling centers to register their votes much like they did in the past or stand in queues to book tickets to a movie or pay bills. This will help in increasing participation as the sick and the old along with people who are physically absent on polling days can take part in the elections. Secondly the results of the polls can be declared without hours of the scheduled close of the polls which would benefit everyone from those contesting the elections to ordinary people taking part in the electoral process.

Summary – In this article we see why polling apps are the future of elections and how a real time voting app can increase participation and streamline elections. 

How Live Voting Apps can Make Your Corporate Meet Successful

As a business you are likely to conduct multiple meetings and events every year. From your shareholders’ meet to annual meeting involving your employees, these can either be engaging or one that participants aren’t eager to attend. Don’t blame your employees or shareholders if you find them fiddling with their smartphones when an important presentation is being made. 

Most people participating in such meets aren’t interested in presentations and lectures you deem ‘important’ but show concern to things that are ‘engaging’. You need to involve your audience and take them along to make the event productive. So why not engage them with a live voting app?

Turn Mobile Phones into Voting Devices
If you feel disappointed seeing people busy with their mobile phones, you can now turn the same distraction into a platform for greater engagement with your audience. Live voting apps help you create that special bond with your listeners that you have always wanted to. These apps allow your audience to poll their vote on important issues that are discussed during your course of presentation. 

For instance shareholders can vote their approval or disapproval regarding selection of new members to the board or pass your audited report. Similarly you can ask your employees to share views on a new business plan. These apps allow you to share your presentation’s content with the user which goes a long way in making these sessions engaging and help you meet your goals.

Immediate Results and Consistency
When you use a live voting app for your presentation there are two ways in which you benefit from it – first it lets you generate voting results in real-time and share these results with your audience. Since there is no manual counting involved in the process results can be generated instantly. Even trends of the votes so far can be shared on giant screens when required. Secondly voting apps also help in improving consistency of the votes compared to voting by voice or those that involve ballot papers.

Hundreds of business houses have benefited with the use of live voting apps and its time you join the revolution. 

Why You Must Use a Cloud Document Management Tool?

If there is one thing that corporate organizations readily embrace, it is technology. Apart from helping them in cutting costs technology has regularly helped them in improving business process and in enhancing productivity and profitability. There are no prizes for guessing that cloud document management systems have been met with great success recently.

If you haven’t ever heard of these tools, the fact is that the world has only seen the tip of the iceberg and with its increased penetration it will soon be a part of every corporate daily work process. So why must you choose a cloud document management tool? Here are few benefits that you can’t possibly ignore.

• Safe and Secure – How often have you lost important documents, either their hard copy or the soft copy? This is something each one of us has faced somewhere in the past. For some this is a part of their daily life! When you use a cloud based document management tool you won’t have to worry about losing them. They would be stored on a secure cloud and would be accessible whenever you want.
• Reduces Cost – Your organization is spending thousands of dollars on its servers and backing up important data. Some organizations still prefer to store a copy of the data on CDs and DVDs. All this is expensive and with a cloud based system you can do away with this cost. As the corporate world is moving towards BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture these cloud based tools are custom-made for it.
• Compliance – There has been increased guidelines regarding storage and access of important corporate data. You can’t afford to lose details of your customers or any other important document to comply with the norms set by the regulators and these tools will prevent such ugly things from happening.
• Green Initiative – Paperless operation has become the global mantra towards a greener and better planet. And moving document management to the cloud will help you reduce creating hardcopies of every document. You will reduce your carbon footprint substantially and can claim yourself as a Green Crusader.

Summary – In this short write-up we talk about some of the benefits of Cloud Document Management tools and how they help businesses.

Clickers in the Classroom - How It Is Changing Education

As an educator you are well aware of ‘active learning approach’ where students partake in different activities as this method has improved classroom participation. While definition wise it is all about engaging students in reading, writing and sharing their opinion without the use of right technology it is a herculean challenge. In today’s world technology has invaded into every aspect of our lives and helped make serious improvements. Talking about education we have seen the power of PowerPoint presentations and Internet in terms of aiding classroom lectures and helping students gain in-depth knowledge in subjects being taught.

In fact technology has in true sense empowered education and made knowledge accessible to millions of students. It has helped improve success rate among students and benefitted the larger education scenario. Clickers are the next big thing that will transform education right from elementary level to higher education. 

Making Education Participative
How do clickers in the classroom help? They make classroom sessions more participative. Traditional model of teaching was a big disadvantage for students who were introvert or ones who lacked behind their peers in terms of grasping concepts. These students never really came out and expressed their opinions on the lessons that were being taught or even the fact that most of what had been discussed didn’t register with their minds. Clickers in the classroom allow students to share their opinion and feedback on what is being taught in the classroom. They allow students to participate anonymously in discussions which are their biggest advantage for students who lag behind their peers.

Generating Feedback
With this technological innovation trainer can gather instant feedback from their students and are able to gauge level of understanding among the students with respect to the lessons that have been taught. At every given point of time the teacher to measure the retention power of the classroom and work on innovative teaching methods that increases retention. They are able to build more active and integrated learning model that make the sessions fruitful and participative for the entire class and not just a group of few brilliant students.

Summary – In this short write-up we take a look at how clickers in the classroom are completely transforming the education system and benefitting the students. 

Interact Live With Your Audience Using Mobile Polling Technology

Modern web and app technology enables presenters to interact live with an audience. They can create questions and ask an audience to respond using a live mobile polling tool, like a dedicated app or website. Once the responses are collected, the results are displayed in the form of a chart. Audiences enjoy polling apps because it helps them connect to speakers and presenters. Most voting and polling apps are accessible via personal devices such as phones, tablets or computers, so meeting organizers do not have to hold their own technology inventory.

Keep all your attendees engaged and entertained in your presentation session

With the help of live mobile polling, you can keep all your attendees engaged throughout your sessions by providing them the opportunity to give feedback and ask questions anonymously. Now presenters can easily manage all kinds of meetings and classroom sessions by using real-time mobile polling.  Polling apps are a terrific way to bring participants into a group discussion and help speakers learn what the audience is thinking.

Audience can share their ideas and present their feedback

Everyone can share their ideas and present live feedback through the smartphones in their hands. Live mobile polling apps provide participants the platform to respond to questions or submit questions of their own at given ‘polling periods’, or at any time texting is enabled. The results submitted to speaker questions are displayed on participant devices instantly, providing the group insight into what those around them are thinking. The presenter can engage local and remote audiences at the same time, using a mobile polling tool that works with both physical clickers and smartphones.

Gain valuable insights about what your audiences think

Audience response technology lets a presenter conduct mobile polls and surveys. The data gathered from those surveys often provides valuable insight about the audience. Live mobile polling technology is truly versatile and works wonders for audience surveys and interactive voting. Participants can vote online using web-enabled devices like smartphones, tablets or PCs and answer anything from a simple question to large survey questionnaires.

Using A Voting App Is The Quickest And Easiest Way To Conduct Elections

Do you want to streamline your election by allowing participants to vote with mobile devices? Since we have apps for everything today, why can￢ﾀﾙt we have an app for voting, too? Voting apps serve as an accessible and secure platform to conduct leadership elections, voting on motions, and consensus polling. With smartphone voting apps, data is collected quickly, calculations are performed flawlessly, and results are immediately accessible following every poll.

Controlled, Easy Access

Smartphone voting apps allow users to open voting to the masses, or restrict it to a small, closed group. Participants are instructed to visit a website and join the vote. Access to the voting session can be open, or participants can be forced to enter information such as name, title, organization, or passcode to gain entry. Vote administrators can select the most secure access keys and require a large or small amount of user information prior to entry. Additionally, with known participants, voting groups and voting rights can be selected such as regional voting, group voting, proxy voting or weighted voting options.

Variety Of Display Options

With electronic voting systems, users have a variety of display options to share or restrict from participants. Vote totals can be shown in graphical forms such as bar, line, and pie charts, or data can be expressed as absolute number or percentage. Voting rules can be applied requiring a simple majority or 2/3 consensus or customized to your specific need. Additionally, voting can be anonymous or public. With smartphone voting, user can choose to show live how each participant is responding in real time or show only vote totals removing name designations from the display.

Reports And Voting Data

After an election or motion vote, all data is recorded within the smartphone voting application. The data lives online in a secure and protected environment. It can be accessed from any device with appropriate privilege and is immediately available for download.  The data can be sorted and reported in a variety of formats. Additionally, all voting data can be printed or emailed directly to your participants.