6 ‘Wow’ Factors of Your New Audience Response System
Click on Live Polls and Surveys to learn more about the latest version of EventMobi’s live feedback tools!
As live events compete with virtual meetings and easily accessible online resources, the race is on to provide attendees with value that goes far beyond watching a virtual event or simply reading an eBook. Even now, live event participants expect more interaction beyond passively sitting in sessions.
Through the years, planners have introduced paper feedback forms and more recently clickers, in the hopes of engaging attendees and collecting important feedback. But paper is costly, produces anecdotal responses, and often yields low response rates. Clickers add tens of thousands of dollars to budgets, and don’t always result in increased feedback.
The advent of polling and survey technology has helped presenters connect with their audiences.
As event professionals, we understand the need to push forward and discover new ways to interact with attendees while integrating those opportunities into the technology they’re already using. Those who have used multiple technologies during a session can appreciate the challenge of keeping attendees focused, following, and responsive while they navigate from your event app into another polling or survey system.
For the past 3 years, EventMobi has been providing audience response capabilities through live polling and surveys seamlessly integrated into your event app to ensure ease-of-use, attendee focus, and simple management. Today, we’re excited to add some brand new features and to bring event feedback to the next level.
EventMobi’s new audience response system keeps all of your event engagement tools under one roof. From live session polls to post-event surveys, attendees interact with speakers and content helping to drive the meeting forward with a valuable experience that only a live event can offer. Here are 6 ways EventMobi’s new audience response system will help deliver value to your attendees.
Find out what your attendees value with pre-event surveys. Registrants can help determine the focus and direction of the meeting. Ask questions like “What are you hoping to learn this year?” or “What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced professionally this year?” Circulate answers among your speakers and encourage them to focus on topics that are relevant to attendees. Pre-event surveys are also a great way to market your event. By appearing conversational, approachable, and agile, prospecting attendees will be more open to exploring your event in more detail.
Help speakers design their session around the audience’s knowledge. If everyone in the room has a social media strategy, there’s no need to start with the basics. Your Live Polls act as your audience’s voice and your speakers’ ears listening to the audience and finding out what they truly desire to learn. Content built around your attendees’ existing knowledge helps you and your speakers deliver relevant information, providing more value to attendees. Many event app providers boast a built-in audience response system and you’re encouraged to test it out with colleagues. Often times, you see slow loading times and clunky user interfaces with new polling products. EventMobi has been in the live polling and surveys game for 3 years. We’ve streamlined the flow of data so it’s instant, whether you’re gauging one audience’s expertise or running multiple session polls simultaneously.
Don’t stop there. Integrated into your event app, your audience response system has a brand new feature called “Ask a Question”, which provides attendees with a new opportunity to engage with speakers throughout the session or during Q&A. Not every attendee is comfortable with voicing their opinion in front of a room full of peers. Engage every attendee by allowing them to ask questions anonymously through your event app’s audience response system. With a list of questions you can easily moderate, other attendees can also vote their favorite questions up the list helping speakers and facilitators gauge the top interests of the audience. While you’re moderating, your attendees are curating.
Forget the paper and pen feedback forms after sessions. Attendees are up and moving, ready for a break, checking their emails and on their way to the next session. In-app session feedback is mobile, accessible, and immediate. With a simple prompt, your speaker can have your attendees checking out the session on the app and providing feedback in one fell swoop. With everything your attendees need directly in the app, you’ll increase response rates and collect data and results immediately instead of sifting through piles of surveys post-event. And no, even your intern doesn’t enjoy that.
Like your immediate session feedback, post-event surveys don’t need to be emailed out a week after your event. Make it easy for attendees with simple, in-app questions. Whether they’re open-text answers, multiple choice, or star ratings, your attendees now have something that they can do on the cab ride to the airport without having to search through email or navigate to another technology. Everything in the app from speakers to agenda to surveys makes your event app the mobile engagement center of your event.
All these results from in-session Q&A, post-session surveys and in-depth event surveys are a wealth of data that we can help turn into actionable knowledge. If everyone at your meeting seems to have a rudimentary understanding of social media, next year you’ll know to have focused breakouts on different platforms. If the speaker asks “Why aren’t you happy with your social media strategy” and 80% of respondents answer, “I can’t keep up”, schedule a 2015 Social Media Update session. Maybe you don’t even know what the next big social media platform will be, but scheduling it now will ensure that there will be time focused on updating attendees with the latest trends and what they can do in their jobs to take advantage of them. Showing respondents the results of their input can also help drive new registrations. The value of the live event lies within the attendees’ ability to engage and draw value from the content.
BONUS FEATURE: Social Wall
Attendees often hesitate to constantly share their event experience with their entire social network. Much of the information they love isn’t actually relevant to their own community of friends and followers. For the social media savvy, it’s important not to scare away followers! Instead of encouraging social activity on open networks like Twitter and Facebook, use your event app’s closed community where everyone is sharing relevant information.
Using your audience response, create a live poll where attendees can answer open questions. As answers roll in, your results display can be projected in high traffic areas! Your Social Wall creates a feed of shared ideas and information anyone at the meeting can share. It can even be moderated too!