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. 

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.

Increases Level of Interactivity Between Audience and Presenter

Online audience response systems are a technological boon for increasing the level of interactivity between an audience and presenter. With the help of this online polling tool, audiences can participate in polling sessions. Through participation, group engagement is elevated and retention of knowledge is greatly increased. The polling system helps the presenter keep track of participant responses and organizes that data in graphs and detailed reports. The audience can participate in the polling sessions by selecting the most appropriate answers from the choices that are provided.

Analyze individual responses during the training session

The online polling tool gathers participant results and aggregates the data visually for the presenter. The response software organizes the data by group, by question, and by participant, allowing for immediate and post-event analysis. The data can be stored locally, uploaded to a secure cloud, or printed out immediately following any session.

Audience understands key concepts in an easy way

The online polling tool promotes a high level of interaction and discussion which increases participant knowledge retention and raises attendee engagement. Response systems, often referred to as Classroom Performance Systems or Student Response Systems, are utilized by teachers in their lessons where they promote lively discussions, are used to review key concepts and provide a platform to evaluate learners. Audience Response Systems are also popular in corporate training environments, as well as academic institutions for their effectiveness in presentations and training sessions.

Raise participation and increase knowledge retention

By engaging participants in a two-way conversation rather than a traditional one-way didactic lecture, online polling tools greatly increase group participation. Additionally, the anonymity provided by online polling provides even the most timid participant with a platform to respond. Online polling also allows presenters to immediately reinforce key points by highlighting correct and incorrect answers. The immediate reinforcement of correct responses greatly increases participant knowledge retention.