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. 

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.

Interact With Your Live Audience In Real Time - Voting Apps

Creating surveys and opinion polls can be a time-consuming and tedious task. Over the years, we have come up with the number of ways to simplify the job of polling the audience. Presenters can utilize mobile voting apps to interact live with their audience. You can create questions, ask your audience to answer the questions and to vote and you can also discuss results live in no time.
                                                                 

No limit to the number of polls you can create

There is no limit to the number of polls you can create. It is a quick and simple way to organise your RSVPs or you can also let your audience cast their votes with the help of mobile devices in their hands. Creating a poll is quite easy now as the user just needs to open their account, select the type of questions they want to pose in front of the audience, enter the details and create live polls while the presentation session is in progress.

Audience can use mobile devices to join polls in real time

The audience can use their smart phones or the tablets to join the polls in real time and they do not have to download anything. So with the help of voting apps, speakers can engage their audience anonymously and in real time and can increase the effectiveness of their presentations.

Radically transform the power of your conversation

So if you are talking to hundreds or thousands of people in a conference, then this application can help you to radically transform the power of your conversation. Your audience can interact with you, critique with the help of voting apps and can also vote on the stage performance. You can learn amazing things about people around you in a new and engaging way.