Measure your audience response - The ShowTime Way.

Measure your audience response - The ShowTime Way.

Raising one's hand was the ancient style of getting people to acknowledge a speaker. People clapped to show their appreciation and booed to show their disapproval since the Roman times. Even today, in many senates and parliaments 'yays' and 'nays' are registered verbally.

But, how can one genuinely measure audience response? The solution was in the form of an Audience Response System (ARS). An ARS is a tool that is used to connect speakers to their participants. This helped in measuring audience interaction throughout the session. It came into existence during the 1950's, after being adapted from military applications and Stanford University (1966) was the first to use polling for educational purposes.



The traditional ARS system was limited to just collecting anonymous participant results, where the trainer asked a question, the participant chose an answer and the results were displayed. The benefits of using an ARS in training were realized slowly.

But traditional ARS have failed to keep up with the demands of modern training due to the following limitations:
  • Participants are hesitant to speak up - Trainee inhibitions in participating during sessions led to poor engagement levels and made the sessions monotonous. Inactive trainees can rob the session of a lively and engaging conversation.
  • They don't hold participants' attention - Most participants in a training session are not able to follow exactly what the trainer is currently teaching. Many of them even leave the session still scratching their heads. The trainers are not aware of the level of trainee comprehension.
  • It's hard to collect feedback - Hard-copy surveys don't bring out reliable responses because many participants do not take the time to fill them out.
  • They can't gather accurate results - Gathering audience insights were not possible with other forms of audience participation (such as raising a hand, response cards) since these needs a database to store information.
The solution? Zoho ShowTime.
Zoho ShowTime is a training delivery tool that lets you interact with your audience in real time. It runs on the cloud, which means you can present as well as interact with your participants.
Here's how,
  •  Engagement - Today's trainees have lightning attention span. This can lead to engagement deficits when the trainer delivers his/ her session. With ShowTime, you are interacting with your trainees in a medium that they constantly use, i.e. the smartphone. This enables them to focus on your session without being distracted.
  • Comprehension - ShowTime turns a presentation into a conversation. Start a poll at the beginning to hook their interest, and run another one at the end to see how close they were paying attention; display the results to the whole room, and let everyone compare responses.
  • Feedback - You know exactly how your participants feel about your talk, both while you present and after you finish. As you explain each slide, participants can tell you which ones they found the most interesting by 'liking' them. Once you are done, you can see how the group rated your presentation overall, and also the session analytics to know how much attention each participant paid to individual slides.
  • Gather Analytics - At the end of your session ShowTime displays engagement metrics specific to each slide. In the long run since the data is stored, you can always refer to them whenever necessary.
Don't stick to a traditional ARS. Access Zoho ShowTime on the Web now. Download the ShowTime Presenter app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. For PowerPoint users, download the plugin from here. Let us know your feedback about your session/presentation by commenting below.

Nandini Diagarajan
Technical Writer - Zoho ShowTime



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