Audience response systems are eliminating the need for organizations to invest large sums into varied single point solutions. From voting and elections to workshop training and classroom gamification, the use cases of audience response systems are endless. They can be configured to serve the needs of businesses, governments, churches, and schools. Here’s a starter list of audience response system use cases.
GOVERNMENT
Election ballots
Smartphone, tablet, desktop and wireless keypad clickers are transformed into ballot voting devices with audience response systems. Leading up to the ballot, system administrators can upload voting choice options and voter participation lists, establish ballot rules, and assign voting weights. At the time of the election, live voting results can be concealed or displayed in real time. A countdown timer and voting end-time can also be assigned. Once the ballot has closed, audience response systems can check for quorum, tally ballot results, and automatically remove voting choices eliminated from previous election rounds. Hours of time spent manually collecting, weighing, verifying and calculating ballot results are saved.
Political conventions
Audience response systems are deployed at political conventions to vote on new policies and law amendments, and manage the candidate and committee chair nomination process. Should the party nominee selection process require a brokered convention, an audience response system with a robust voting software can handle the required series of ballots.
Plank voting
Plank voting requires party delegates to choose between hundreds of public policy goals and proposals (“planks”) and select their most preferred and opposed planks. Very few audience response systems can support the entry of hundreds of voting choices. Vistacom’s audience response system is uniquely powerful enough to support the entire plank voting process. With Vistacom’s audience response system, party delegates can vote on an unlimited number of planks. The results are tallied in real-time, and can either be displayed on screen or privately recorded.
Town halls
Large communities can hold votes during their town halls with an audience response system. The alternative of conducting votes manually oftentimes causes inaccurate vote counts, delays and divisive conflict. Using audience response systems, town hall leaders can manage community voting with ease. Voter submissions can be verified for remote participants connecting via mobile, and voter submissions can be concealed for sensitive ballots. Voting results are calculated in real time, allowing town hall leaders to redirect time spent manually conducting votes to consensus building.
Audience response systems can also be used to facilitate dialogue at town halls. Using their mobile devices, attendees can submit questions to be addressed by town hall leaders. Question submissions immediately post onto a live display-board. This is especially useful for town halls that attract large numbers. Town hall leaders can also use live audience polling to promote community involvement in decision making.
CONFERENCES & MEETINGS
Conference planning
Rather than waiting until after the event has ended to collect feedback, conference organizers can use audience response systems to gather feedback in live meeting environments. Prompting conference attendees to submit feedback at the end of each session can result in maximized survey participation.
If set up prior to meetings, audience response systems can be paired with registration survey questions to administer a preliminary round of polling. In this way, meeting organizers and presenters will be better able to anticipate which challenges and concerns attendees find to be most pressing.
Meeting engagement
There are many conference attendees who aren’t comfortable standing in front of a large crowd and voicing their questions out in the open. Mobile audience response systems solve this challenge by allowing attendees to anonymously submit their questions for panelists and speakers from their smartphone or tablet device.
To capture the sentiments of meeting attendees, audience response systems can also use word clouds to aggregate and provide visual snapshots of live audience polling and survey sessions. These word clouds can also be integrated into meeting data reporting.
Large-Scale Presenting
Meeting speakers, whether presenting in front of employees or conference attendees, can benefit from making their presentation interactive and engaging through conversational presenting. Using audience response systems, meeting speakers and presenters can incorporate live audience polling into their presentation and incorporate audience feedback into their talking points. This is an effective method for sparking excitement and keeping the attention of meeting participants.
Meeting facilitators can also encourage attendees to submit and vote on one another’s questions throughout the duration of the meeting. Using upvoting features, meeting participants can identify with the concerns and questions submitted by other participants.
Religious & General Assembly Meetings
Most religious bodies hold regional and international conventions and delegate meetings for the purposes of voting on legislative matters, appointing religious officials and addressing pressing issues. Audience response systems are used to facilitate elections, gather consent for program directives and resolutions, and vote on policies and bylaws.
Meeting organizers can specify voting rules such as weighted voting, concealed voting, and restricted voting. A countdown timer can also be set to ensure assembly delegates vote in a timely manner and stay on schedule.
Sales
Sales Kickoff Planning
Sales kickoff (SKO) meeting organizers can use audience response systems to gather and deliver feedback to the senior leaders of their organization. Short quizzes and polls can be initiated during sales team meetings to identify skills gaps, procedural bottlenecks and challenges that should be prioritized. Surveys can be used to collect open-ended suggestions, and gain valuable feedback on which SKO materials and initiatives were most or least effective.
Sales Training Engagement
Narratives use cases, examples and scenarios help bring sales training concepts to life. With audience response systems, workshop speakers and presenters can invite attendees to vote on scenario-based questions. This is an effective technique used for sales strategy training as well as product learning sessions. Knowledge quizzes and polls can also be incorporated into the presentations to measure sales reps’ ability to apply the right solution to problems addressed in each training session. Live polls can also be deployed at the start and end of each session to measure whether the sentiments of presentation attendees has changed.
Sales Training Reinforcement
With a bit of data collection planning, audience response systems can serve as the basis for sales training reinforcement programs. Live audience polling and survey data collected during sales kickoffs and other sales training can be prescribed a grading system. Follow up learning opportunities (i.e. webinars, e-learning modules) can then be recommended or required for sales reps to complete based on their data scoring.
Sales Competition
Audience response systems can be used to tap into salespeople’s naturally competitive nature. Sales kickoffs and training sessions can be livened up with a bit of competition. Sales reps can have their learning retention and memory recall tested with bite-sized quizzes. The points won from each quiz can then be awarded to individual reps or teams. Competition standings can be displayed during training and SKO events. At the end of the quarter, year or other period of mark, sales reps and/or teams can be rewarded for their skills development and improvements in ability.
Trade Shows
Audience response systems bring an interactive element to trade show exhibition floors, and serve as a successful lead generator. Passerby’s can be enticed with quiz-based sweepstakes competitions and surveys presented on mobile or tablet devices. To make things more interesting, data collected from trade show visitors can even be incorporated into presentations being led during the conference.
HR
All-Hands Meetings
All-hands meetings provide a great opportunity to strengthen communication between senior management and the greater workforce through live audience polling. Using an audience response system, all-hands meeting organizers can collect employee/team feedback as presentations are given. The poll/survey responses can be gathered anonymously to ensure that answers are submitted without bias.
Feedback results can also be displayed live in order to kickstart dialogues that encourage transparency and collaboration. Live audience polling can also be adapted in real time to match the flow of all hands meetings. Meeting moderators can create new polls during the course of all-hands meetings.
Employee listening
With live audience surveying, department leaders can gather employee feedback, and better implement collaborative decision making on policy and strategy changes. Rather than measuring employee opinion by applause or hand-raising, employee feedback can be gathered all at once with full transparency. Survey results can be displayed and discussed to demonstrate to employees that their voices are being heard.
Employee training
Audience response systems improve the effectiveness of employee trainings from planning to delivery to follow up. With live audience polling and survey assessments, training leaders can monitor trainee comprehension and respond to gaps in understanding in real-time. Preliminary polls can be administered virtually to ensure the workshop focus areas and content delivery methods match the needs and learning styles of attendees. These polls can also be used to establish a baseline measure of trainees’ foundational knowledge, and later assess the impact of employee trainings on their skills and knowledge development. Depending on the sensitivity of the workshop topic, audience response systems can be setup to support anonymous participation. Through better training, employee retention, skill development and morale are improved.
Employee Learning Programs
Audience response systems with mobile capabilities can be used to measure learning retention, and track the immediate and long-term effects of employee trainings. To achieve this, select questions posed during the preliminary and live audience response sessions are incorporated into follow up surveys and assessments. Information retention is better supported, and HR leaders can better assess the learning of employees using their audience response systems reporting analytics.
Shareholder voting
In a bid to improve shareholder participation, corporations are adopting audience response systems to encourage greater participation amongst minority shareholders. Democratizing shareholder participation, investors are able to exercise their voting rights remotely using their smartphone or electronic device. One of the most important privileges that common stock shareholders have is the right to vote at annual general meetings.
Lead times and paperwork associated with shareholder voting during annual general meetings are virtually eliminated. Shareholder vote counting is both more accurate and efficient. Shareholder votes are protected by voter verification capabilities. Shareholder voter participation and voting results can be monitored in real time.
Marketing
Focus Groups
Audience response systems make things simple for focus group facilitators, eliminating the risk of data collection bias and skewed results. Focus group participants can submit poll and survey answers anonymously without fear of judgement from others. On the other end, focus group leaders can ensure that participants with dominant opinions do not skew results. Icebreaker quizzes and intermittent polling can also be deployed to help participants overcome shyness.
Market Research
Audience response systems are powerful enough to support large market research campaigns collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. Data collection and analysis is simplified thanks to automated processing. Market research leaders can also invite candidates from remote areas to join live sessions using a computer or mobile device. ARS-powered market research campaigns ultimately are more efficient and less time consuming.
Entertainment
Television Game Shows
Game show producers are delivering production value with audience response systems that support audience quizzing, competition and live voting. Most often used for Ask the audience and competitive Q&A formats, audience response systems collect answers from game show audiences with super speed and accuracy. Recently, NBCUniversal used an audience response system to pilot a game show that challenged audience members to predict the advice of the game show’s panel of experts.
Professional Sports
Sports fans of today aren’t interested in sitting back and passively watching a game. When watching from their TV or online, sports fans use social media to engage with other supporters. Many expect similar opportunities to bond with their fellow supporters when going to sports games. In a quest to make games more immersive experiences, sports leagues and associations are using audience response technology to deploy live polls and quizzes.
With audience response systems technology, sports competition organizers can ensure spectator participation and excitement doesn’t wane. By gamifying live polls and quizzes, system operators can display competition results live on screen during sports breaks.
Healthcare
Continuing Medical Education (CME) Meetings
Audience response systems are often used to engage CME attendees in interactive learning and collect qualitative and quantitative session impact data. CME lecturers engage attendees in interactive problem-solving exercises, case study analysis, and learning gap assessments with live polls and surveys. CME organizers and speakers can measure the impact of each session on conceptual understanding and medical decision making, and make adaptations to follow up sessions in real time. Audience response systems with robust reporting capabilities can deliver data to be directly inputted into outcomes measurement reporting.
Clinical Investigator meetings
Conducting clinical trials has become more complicated than times past. Pharmaceutical companies are faced with increasingly complex protocols and rising regulatory scrutiny. Using audience response systems, investigator meeting organizers are able to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback on the clinical trial design, and conduct live polls and voting decisions on the strategy behind a clinical study. This data can be monitored in real time and exported for reporting purposes post meeting.
Advisory board meetings
Pharmaceutical companies are using audience response systems to facilitate participation in virtual and in-person advisory board meetings. In an effort to increase ad board attendance and cost efficiency, some pharmaceutical companies deploy mobile audience response for virtual and blended in-person/remote ad board meetings. Audience response systems can be used to collect preliminary and real time feedback from key opinion leaders. Key opinion leaders can join in live polls and surveys using keypad or mobile devices. At the same time, ad board organizers can monitor and respond to feedback collected from key opinion leaders.
Ad board organizers together with senior leaders can vet collected qualitative and quantitative data for inconsistencies and identify disagreements between key opinion leaders using ARS data reporting.
EDUCATION
Gamified learning
Learning retention is an uphill battle for teachers and professors. By using a classroom response solution to gamify live polls and surveys, students are both entertained and engaged in interactive learning competitions that reinforce key concepts. Competitions are easily set up with predetermined correct answers and point systems. Students can compete as individuals or in teams. The most advanced audience response systems have Jeopardy game formats embedded into their classroom response solution, so that points are awarded to the first team or individual to answer a question correctly.
Flipped classroom
Classroom flipping models are supported by audience response systems that allow for students to engage in critical thinking, reflect on interactive media, and complete problem solving exercises in small groups. Using classroom response solutions, teachers and professors both encourage and monitor the impact of active learning exercises on student comprehension in real time and longitudinally with data reporting.
Formative assessment
Audience response systems are being used in the classroom for formative assessment purposes, and enabling educators to evaluate student comprehension in real time. Using bite-sized quizzes to collect open-ended and multiple choice responses, teachers can monitor student understanding in the moment, incorporate student responses into follow up classroom discussions and individualize instruction during breakout sessions.
Academic Symposia
Audience response systems facilitate knowledge sharing between researchers during academic symposia. Research presenters can embed discussion questions into their presentations using live polls and surveys, and crowdsource thought provoking questions and ideas from presentation attendees with live Q&A. This audience response data can be extracted and used to refine future research.
