Events are changing, and so are the attendees. Gone are the days when people used to attend events just to get updates and learn about the new innovations in the industry. Present-day attendees look for more - they just don’t want to be restricted as a silent audience. They want to explore, engage and network. They want to be an active part of the event. Live polls are a great way to engage the attendees and make them a part of the action. Live polls can act as a catalyst in attendee engagement. Moreover, you get an insight of your attendees’ choices. Here are a few ways you can increase attendee engagement through live polls.
Select The Right Poll Type
When it comes to live polling, there are many types of poll you can go for. There are plenty of options like open text, multiple-choice, rating polls and word cloud. You can easily choose from any of these, depending upon your need and preference. Multiple-choice polls are ideal for warming up your attendees or even to measure their knowledge. With open-texts you give your attendees the freedom to put their best and worst opinions forward. These are really effective for crowdsourcing suggestions and challenges. Rating poll works best when you want your attendees to rate something. It can be a speaker, a session, an agenda or even the whole event. And last but not the least, word cloud - which is more fun than any other poll. In these, your attendees get a fair chance to express their opinions with not more than one or two words.
Create Group Conversations
Live polling works really well when it comes to initiating group conversations and discussions among your attendees. You can include small polls related to the agenda in your session and let your attendees vote to know their opinion on the particular topic. These polls can be anything - multiple-choice, word cloud or even open texts. For starting a discussion, open-texts are a good choice. Attendees get the freedom to put forward everything they have to say with open-word, no restrictions at all. On the other hand, multiple-choice is preferable when you want to initiate a group conversation in between a session. Also, on the basis of these poll results you can get a conversation started. This also leads to greater attendee engagement and networking. In such discussions and conversations, attendees get to know each other in a better way and they get an opportunity to network with their peers.
Collect Real Time Session Feedback
Feedback is really important, especially when it comes from your attendees. It is very important for you to know the opinions of your attendees so that you know what really worked for you and what didn’t work. Feedback get you on the road of improvement for all your upcoming events. But this process can get very tiring with a huge number of attendees. Feedback sheets are not enough for the work anymore. Sometimes attendees are too lazy to fill it up, and sometimes they just forget about it or misplace it. And it becomes really tiring for you to go through all those sheets of feedback. Moreover, its wastage of paper, because ultimately, it goes to the bin. The best alternative to this is live polling. You can just start a rating poll for every session, speaker, agenda and all the other activities you will be having. It gets very easy for the attendees to rate with just a few clicks. And you keep getting real time feedback.
Measure Your Audience Engagement
The success of an event is determined from the number of people engaging with it. In order to make your event a success, to know what worked and what did not, you can bring live polling into use. Through polls you can track the impression, the number of people interacting and the number of people actually actively participating. From the polls you would be able to anticipate what are the things which interests your attendees. You can customise the plans for your future events accordingly.
Brainstorm New Ideas
Many a time, event planners have new ideas but they are not very sure of it. They doubt whether the idea would work for the attendees or not. With live polling, you easily get to know the attendees opinion. You can easily put a poll describing your ideas and asking them whether they liked it or not. This way, you get an idea about what could work best for the event and what might not work so well. Moreover, you can ask your attendees to come up with their own ideas for some program of the event, session or agenda.This way, attendees become an active part of the whole action going around and they just don’t remain as silent audience. They get to explore, learn and engage at different levels during the event.
Effortlessly Collect Votes For Competition
Event planners organize many competitions in the event to increase attendee engagement. They make the attendees participate in many solo and group activities to break that awkward wall between the attendees. Live polling can come to your use in two ways. First, you can ask your attendees to select one activity they would like to do through polling. Second, you can decide the winner through audience poll. You can ask your attendees to vote for the individual or the group they liked the most. For collecting the votes of your attendees, multiple-choice poll or rating poll both will work well. You can either put multiple-choice poll at the end of the competition with the names of the best performers or you can start a rating poll at the end of every performance.
Develop An Event Program
When you are organizing an event, you can get your attendees involved in it to increase the engagement. You can put polls asking them about the event theme they would like to see, the kind of sessions they would like to attend, the session agendas and even the speakers. You can ask them all through polls. This way you will be able to increase attendee engagement and visibility of your event. You can involve your attendees from the very beginning and make them feel valued.
Event Gamification
Gamification is the new trend. Many event planners include games in their event apps. You can start a poll asking your attendees which games they would prefer. Or you can create a game with polls itself using augmented reality. There is so much more that you can do with live polling. It is a feature you must look for when deciding your event app and event website. Live polling is as important as analytics, you get real time updates and valuable attendee insights through it. While going for live polling, pick the topics related to your event and form questions which will intrigue your attendees. You must make the instructions very clear so that your attendees know what they are supposed to do and allow them enough time to think before voting. Also, you should always comment on the results and appreciate the participation. It’s all about effective two-way communication.
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