How live polling can transform your events with minimal effort and zero cost

Live polling is one of the single most powerful tools you have at your disposal when it comes to raising engagement and interaction rates at your event.

It can be the key to transforming a passive audience into a dynamic collective of active participants.

Basically, the holy grail of business events. Get this right and your meeting will rise to the top in a crowded event marketplace.

Not only that, choose the right tools and invest a little time thinking about your audience and plotting tactics with your speakers and moderators, and you’ll find that integrating live polling into your sessions is incredibly easy and practically free.

So how come fewer than 20% of event managers bother to use it?

Perhaps people think the tech is expensive or difficult to deploy? Maybe they think it will take too much time to develop questions? Or maybe they just don’t see how it could be helpful.

So we thought we’d take a look at just how easy it is to add live polls to your next in-person, virtual or hybrid event, and some of the cool things you can do with it.

How does live polling work in practice

In essence, live polling allows your attendees to answer questions posed by the speaker or organiser in real-time using their mobile devices, with the results displayed instantly on screen, providing immediate feedback and enhancing audience engagement during a presentation or session.

In other words, it’s a way to gather opinions and preferences from your audience as the event unfolds.

It can be delivered through your attendee app or via a third-party polling app you ask your attendees to download. We’ll come back to the technical side in a moment.

What’s live polling useful for?

Exactly what you use live polling for will depend on the specific goals of your event or a particular session. For conferences, you might use it to help speakers get the audience more involved in the content by asking for their opinions on certain issues.

For in-house corporate meetings, polling can be a great way of gauging sentiment among employees or customers, and getting the group to work collaboratively to set priorities and shape strategy.

Some of the most popular use-cases are:

• Warming up the audience at the beginning of a session with an ice-breaker question
• Increasing engagement by actively involving attendees in the session, making them feel part of the discussion
• Collecting real-time feedback and insights by capturing attendees’ immediate reactions and opinions
• Prompting attendees to share their views in a structured way
• Getting attendees to help shape presentations or panel discussions by voting on the specific sub-topics or issues they’re most interested in
• Gathering data you can use during and after the event, to inform your meeting planning and your wider business strategy

Choose and deploy your polling tech

Not all live polling services are created equal.

As with everything in events, you’re looking for a solution that is easy to use, both for you as the organiser, and for your participants. If polls aren’t simple to set up in advance and trigger when needed, you’ll struggle to deploy them on the day with all the other moving parts you need to manage.

And if attendees can’t vote easily on their own device without having to download another app, chances are they won’t vote at all.

The biggest worry organisers have when it comes to polls is that audience members just won’t participate in them.

In our experience, the key to overcoming this is to have the polling and Q&A functions as a fully integrated part your attendee app, which itself is built using the same codebase as the rest of your event platform, including the virtual environment.

People have too many apps on their devices and are increasingly resistant to download more – especially just for a one or two day conference.

This is why we deliver the AttendZen app as a Progressive Web App (PWA). PWAs are built using web platform technologies, so they can run on multiple operating systems and device classes from the same codebase as the rest of the AttendZen cloud platform.

The PWA allows us to provide attendees with a native-like experience which can be installed in seconds without having to go via the different app stores, and without having to download an actual application that afterwards continues to sit on their device, gathering dust and taking up space.

This means that – even if a participant has not downloaded the app prior to the event – they can literally scan a QR code from the screen during the session, get the app and take part in a poll within seconds.

And because we avoid the need to develop and maintain two sets of expensive, old-fashioned native app tech, we’re able to give our customers unlimited attendee apps for all their events at no extra charge.

Of course, there are no shortage of companies out there offering polling solutions.

As a minimum though, you should be asking vendors:

• Can you simultaneously serve the same poll to an in-person and virtual audience, with shared poll results across both groups in real-time?
• How can polls be delivered – on mobile (for an in-person event), projected onto the screen in the room? Can you simultaneously drag the poll results onto the video stream in the virtual environment?
• Can you pre-load polls in advance or do they have to be created on the fly during your event?
• Can you pre-schedule the launch of each poll or do you have to manually trigger each one?
• Can you share poll results live or is there a delay?
• Can you capture poll questions and responses for later analysis?
  
  

Plan your questions

Once you’ve settled on the technology you’ll use to deploy polling at your event, it’s time to plan your questions.

The key here is to work with speakers and moderators in advance – getting them to think about questions that would stimulate interesting debate in the context of their particular session or panel.

The goal is really to provoke thought; to allow the whole audience to learn something from the responses of their peers, and to encourage discussion.

You need people to be able to think and answer in a few seconds – while continuing to follow what’s happening on stage – so it’s generally wise to stick to multiple-choice questions.

Keep the questions themselves short and simple – or you risk having your presenter get sidetracked by a completely off-topic response.

Questions like this from a recent auto industry event work well:

When will electric vehicles make up 80% of the US market?

By 2030
By 2035
By 2040
By 2050
Never

Resist the temptation to cram too many polls into your event. As a general rule, in a one-hour session, three-to-five polls should be your maximum if you don’t want to risk overwhelming your audience.

Work with your speakers to schedule polls during natural breaks or transitions in presentations. For instance, you can pose questions after a speaker presents a new concept or product, or when they want to understand what the consensus in the room is on a particular topic.

A popular approach is to mix in some fun (if not frivolous) questions alongside the more heavyweight ones to maintain a lively atmosphere and encourage people to relax and be open in their opinions.

Prompt attendees to take part

Make sure that you explain to attendees at the start of the session that there will be some polls and show them how to vote using the app. This will ensure that participants are ready to vote when the time comes and avoid disrupting the flow of your content.

If you’re using PWA technology like ours, you can put the QR code up on the screen and have people install the app there and then in seconds.

In summary

So there you have it.

Live polling can really elevate you event from just another classroom-style passive experience to a genuinely interactive experience that will bring attendees back, year after year.

It doesn’t have to be difficult, or soak up precious time and resources on the day.

And if you’re an AttendZen client it costs literally nothing, along with the rest of our leading-edge attendee app!

So there’s no excuse not to ask your attendees get involved and share their expertise with the group.