Interactive Polling: Audience Feedback

October 30, 2013 // Meeting Management

Interactive Polling: Reading the Minds of Your Audience

Audience feedback is one of the most important ways you can improve you meetings and events. Comment cards or surveys can help guide you when it comes to crafting your next event, but why not take advantage of the group while you have them and get real-time feedback?

When you’re looking for a rough idea of how an audience is feeling, just having a show of hands might be sufficient. When it comes time for an exact vote count, or if you just want to add a splash of technology to your meeting, you may want to consider many of the great interactive polling options available.

Interactive polling technology goes by many names and comes in many packages. The most common of the options is still, by far, the wireless keypad. These are handheld devices with a number keypad on them and perhaps an LED display to let the voter know their vote has been counted.

Different people refer to these keypads in different ways. Here’s just a few of them:

APT (Audience Polling Technology)
ART (Audience Response Technology)
Voting Keypads
Reply System (A brand name of voting keypad)
Audience Clickers

There are scores of different makes and models of these keypad devices, but they all pretty much run the same way. The presenter will ask a question and usually display a slide with the answer options. An example might be “Which of our products do you think has the highest profit margin? 1) Wrenches, 2) Hammers, or 3) Screwdrivers.” Sometimes this slide is displayed via specially designed software. In other systems the options might be embedded in a PowerPoint deck.

Note: Many of the dedicated software systems for APT haven’t been updated in a long time, so they can look a little dated. However, with a few modern exceptions, I haven’t found embedding the polling in PowerPoint to be very stable, and can cause crashes. I’ll take a little dated and stable over pretty and likely to blow up, any day.

Once the question has been posed, the audience members take their keypads and enter in the number that corresponds to their answer. If the keypad has a display, the number they entered will display to indicate that their vote has been registered. The keypads operate on a closed wireless network, and send their signals to a base station located backstage or at the tech table. This base station is hooked up to a laptop where the data is crunched and the results can be displayed- again via dedicated software or embedded in PowerPoint. The speaker is now able to address the results in real time.

The biggest advantage to this type of interactive polling is that it is a closed network, compared to some of the options we’re about to look at. It should come as no surprise then that these types of hardware solutions are popular with financial and medical groups, where security and confidentiality are extremely important. We recently provided polling keypads for a group that was so secure.

There are a few high end models that offer users a whole new level of interactivity. These new models feature full QWERTY keyboards, color display screens, and even built in microphone and wireless audio support. If the voting needs to be tracked, attendees can insert a special encoded badge into the keypad, identifying them. To return to anonymous polling, they simply need to remove the badge.

Just as conference and trade show brochures are being phased out in favor of mobile phone applications, so too are the old polling keypads. With the majority of meeting and conference goers walking around with a wireless supercomputer in their pocket, more and more planners are exploring the world of mobile and web-based polling technology. Some Internet-based services even allow users to vote through multiple options, increasing the response rate dramatically. These options include voting via text message, a mobile web site, or even via Twitter.

Many mobile event apps are building in the ability to push polling to their users in an attempt to be the “One App to Rule Them All”. Others use stand-alone polling apps, and still others use mobile websites. Whichever route you go, be sure to take into account how that data will be gathered and displayed. Almost all of these services are going to require internet access of some kind in order for the attendees to send their responses, so there either needs to be quality cellular data services or WiFi available. In other words, you can send a text message with “only one bar” of signal much easier than you can access a mobile web page on the data network.

These services are growing in popularity exponentially with our customers. We find that once they dip their toes in the interactive polling pool, they become addicted (in a good way) to that instant feedback. Everything from educational quizzes and game shows, to voting on what to name their internal network, customers are finding more and more creative uses for live interactive polling.

Brandt Krueger | Director, Video and Production Technology
After graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. in 1995 with a degree in Technical Theatre, Krueger found himself working for a theatrical equipment rental company. It was there that he made initial contacts that would draw him away from the theater and into hotel ballrooms around the world. Just under a year later, he was hired by metroConnections to help build their event decor fabrication shop and to manage their growing event rental inventory. He also quickly branched into a technology role, building the company’s first website as well as designing interactive game shows for team building events within the next couple years. His role has continued to evolve over the years and now he’s “the man on the headset” for most of metroConnections’ large scale meetings and events, helping to produce hundreds of meetings and technical productions.