Vote: Don’t talk to your audience – fascinate it!

The ability of the speaker to captivate and fascinate his audience is never easy to achieve particularly when coupled with the need to actively involve the listeners or spectators who are not only the main focus of attention but also, invariably the most critical of judges.

If you think back to previous events, how often have you observed or felt an atmosphere of frustration because the participant’s attention was no longer focused on the topic under discussion or the problem in question? How often have you come across a situation where a question addressed to the audience appears to be ignored by 50% of the audience on a rough hand count? Psychologists will bombard you with vastly complex communication techniques based on behavioural and psychological studies but all too often what the audience really wants is to be involved, consulted or simply just to be recognised as real people rather than numbers on a delegate list or payroll computer. In many such cases this is primarily a lack of insight: The conference organiser may be the one that everybody looks at if everything falls flat, but in reality the speaker is the person ultimately responsible for whether his audience has to endure one-way communication (i.e. being talked at) or can enjoy the experience and dynamism of true two-way communications created through Interaction. Through the use of “Interaction” conference organisers can help themselves and their speakers create the type of environment and atmosphere that customers or management have asked them to create and to facilitate the delivery and feedback in a dynamic fashion.

Interaction in the context of a conference or meeting can be described as a two-way participative process to facilitate transmission of information, collection of feedback, action planning and data/ collection through the involvement and participation of the audience.

Participation, retention, empowerment, entertainment, motivation and data collection/analysis can all be facilitated by introducing interaction. However to illustrate what this means to the organiser and his audience, listed alongside are just some of the uses that we at BRÄHLER ICS have been asked to deliver through our audience response technology:

• To bring the presenter and the audience closer together
• To encourage discussion and debate
• To expedite decision making
• To overcome peer pressure
• To lower barriers
• To build team spirit
• To identify differences of opinion
• To entertain or create a sense of fun
• To consult with staff or customers
• To facilitate self-assessment and/or benchmarking
• To encourage brainstorming/sharing of ideas.
• To gather market research information/conduct straw polls
• To help an audience retain complex information
• To enable an audience to follow difficult issues
• To gauge if an audience is being convinced or not
• To hold an audiences attention
• To generate instant feedback
• To identify key issues quickly

There are of course many different forms of Interaction but the use of audience response technology has proved extremely versatile. Interaction is able to combine many of the necessary elements in single operations and is a cost-effective solution to a common problem.

Audience Response Technology

Audience response systems, group response systems, voting systems, opinion polling systems or decision support systems; no matter what name it comes under, interactive technology has caught the attention and the imagination of meeting planners and conference organisers right across the globe. The first computerised system was launched by BRÄHLER Konferenztechnik in 1976 and in recent years the market has exploded with a proliferation of different suppliers offering a number of hardware and software solutions.

At first glance, you may not identify the full range of benefits – but take a deeper look. Such systems can save you time and money: For example, an organisation required to deliver lengthy delegate voting sessions at their annual conference can save days (and all the associated costs) by using audience response technology. The collection of feedback or market research can be facilitated at a fraction of more traditional and labour intensive methods. The same can also be said for using audience response technology in place of other entertainment or motivational programmes. In fact the list of uses, savings and benefits is virtually endless once you grasp the full concept and let imagination and creativity do the rest. Even if you consider the initial costs high for single-day or single-session use, the cost of incorporating audience response rapidly plummets when calculated on extended or additional use.

Conference organisers and meeting planners are choosing such technology to collect data or survey members, customers, clients, or employees on safety, product preference, and delivery performance issues and more recently for self-assessment programmes. The technology is also being employed to enable audiences to participate actively in what’s being talked about; the focus here is not information collection, but the learning process. Utilising the technology merely as a convenient survey tool means that you miss out on 90% of its capabilities but pay 100% of the costs. Don’t forget, audience response technology can and is used for a number of reasons. For example:

Participation – to involve the audience

Learning – as a teaching or training aid

Retention – people remember more when they are involved

Empowerment – to facilitate consultation amongst groups

Motivation – to hear and react to the audience’s opinions

Entertainment – through quizzes and games

Data Collection – Surveys or questionnaires

Evaluation – consensus or divergence of opinions

The above chart illustrates one powerful effect that can be achieved through effective use of an audience response system, there are many others, for instance: The use of audience response technology can at least halve the time it takes to do delegate voting. Dependent on the complexity of the vote and the size of the audience, it can take just 30 seconds to ask the question, get the responses, tabulate, provide data, comment on it, and produce a demographic (results by audience profiles) response.

Whilst cable systems (closed systems) can still boast the greatest reliability, wireless systems based on radio-frequency technology boast the advantage of fast set-up. New technology has proved radiofrequency based wireless systems to be extremely efficient and in general more cost effective and less hassle for both organisers and participants alike.

Audience response or interactive technology can be the driving force for the organisation and delivery of effective presentations and more importantly, how it is received. It can lift and invigorate most conferences.

Эта запись была опубликована 30.11.2009в 16:54. В рубриках: Решения. Вы можете следить за ответами к этой записи через RSS 2.0. Вы можете оставить свой комментарий или трекбек со своего сайта.