At corporate events, particularly conferences, attendees have several, if not several dozens, of speakers to choose from. The deciding factor isn’t always the topic that they find the most interesting.
Instead, attendees also pay consideration to how engaging the speaker is, and how engaging other speakers are. There is a certain level of friendly competition between speakers, and it can be hard to stand out at a larger event.
Incorporating conference tech can help speakers to streamline their presentations and make themselves stand out. As a bonus, engaging with sessions help your attendees remain interested and checked in—and polling is one of the best pieces of conference tech for this.
Why Polling is the Conference Tech For the Job
Polling makes a session or conference more interesting to attend live, and also helps attendees better retain the information they hear by involving them in the presentation.
Many speakers often have far more material and thoughts to share than is possible to cover during the session, so live polling can be used to streamline presentations for what the audience wants to hear. It opens up possibilities for engagement beyond yes/no questions answered through raised hands.
3 Benefits of Polling
- Speakers can find valuable information from the audience that will inform the rest of the presentation, allowing them to be more engaging. A marketer teaching about blogging, for example, might benefit from knowing how long each member in the room has been a blogger.
- It’s anonymous and does not require verbal participation. A major advantage of conference tech is that it allows everyone to participate more frequently. Polling can help even the most introverted of attendees be heard.
- It’s easy to immediately identify topics and concerns that are top-of-mind for the audience.
Ways to Use Polling
It’s possible to incorporate polling software directly into the conference application. Although independent polling software exists, incorporating it into your existing conference tech can free up a lot of your budget. Conference organizers no longer need to provide a dedicated polling device for each participant because a conference app installed on attendees’ devices can double as a controller.
The ease of use means that you can incorporate polling at several different points of the session, and in different ways.
The International Legal Technology Association Rev-Elation conference, for example, conducted several polls throughout a five-day conference on topics ranging from leadership, innovations in technology, new business strategies, and current legal issues. This added more relevance to the attendee experience by encouraging attendees to be engaged and aware of current topics. Organizers can also get feedback from attendees, and access the results as quickly as the audience responds.
Some types of conference tech allow you to send the polling data to users at the conclusion of the session. This can be a great way to refresh attendees’ memories, and open up discussion about the session even after the event has ended. As an alternative, keeping results from the respondents can allow you to adapt your conference tech into quizzes. Setting up key questions for attendees weigh in on before they walk out the door is a great way to see what really stuck with them, or what needs further clarification.
