Live polling at events

It’s really important to ensure live polling is used for a reason – to meet a specific objective. This might be to generate useful data for your business, which could be used to inform decision making, or simply to create infographic-style content for your communications or social media teams. It might be because you want to make a content-heavy event more participatory, to keep the audience engaged by being active. Or live polling might be used to crowdsource preferences, which could then determine the content presented later in the day. These are all great ways to use audience response systems, and having a clear objective like this is crucial.

Once you’ve established your requirement for live polling, the next stage is to think about your poll questions. One way to do this is to flip the challenge and think about the sort of answers you might want to generate. For example, your objective might be to get some tweetable pieces of market research from your audience, so design a series of multiple choice questions that create the outcome “75% of (accountants/entreprenuers/firemen) prefer cats to dogs”. If you start with the end result, crafting your live polling questions for your audience response system is easy.

There’s no right or wrong answer about the optimum number of live poll questions you use. However, getting your audience comfortable with the technology early in the session is a useful way to maximise participation. Similarly, bursts of live polling questions can be helpful, so audience members go through a period of participation, followed by a period of listening. You can also use live polling questions after a presentation, to gather feedback, or without a presentation at all.

There are lots of audience response systems out there, but we think Glisser has some big advantages. It’s really easy to set up a live poll question – simply drag and drop the type of poll you want into the position you want within the slide deck. Then write your question, and answers (if it’s a multiple choice poll) and hit save. You can create as many polls as you like – multiple choice, ratings, or free text – and reorder as required. The live polls are then fully integrated within your slide deck, and you just hit space bar to reveal the result. If you don’t want to show the result to the audience – just don’t hit space bar. It’s as easy as that. It’s free to start live polling on Glisser, with no limit on the number of polls you can create or the size of your audience. Give it a try today.