Spotlight 3: Read your audience with polls

Delivering a presentation to an audience that's not engaged is like talking to an empty room. Asking questions during your session can definitely help by encouraging the crowd to get involved with you. However, it isn't easy to spark a conversation if audience members are not confident speaking in front of others, or if they only give closed-ended answers.

To make participation easier, solicit input from your audience by adding polls to your sessions. Plan the questions that you'd like to ask and set them up as polls before you begin your session, or create them on the fly while you are delivering your presentation. You can create different kinds of poll questions depending on the type of responses you'd like to get.

Gather targeted answers

Create a multiple-choice poll to get specific answers from your session audience by providing them with a list of options to choose from. To tally answers that aren't covered by the listed choices, you can consider including an 'Other' option.

Ask for a ranking

Create a star rating poll to evaluate audience members' experience on a scale or assess how they feel about a certain idea or thought. For example, you could ask people to grade the clarity of the presentation while it's in progress.

Gather opinions

Create a text box poll to give your audience a chance to speak their mind. Open-ended questions let you see your audience's responses in their own words and understand their views on an interesting or unexplored topic.

Project a poll question at a strategic time during your presentation to help your audience stay focused and to elicit candid answers.

Regardless of your settings, Backstage allows you to collect feedback about the overall session at the end of the presentation. Audiences can tell you whether they benefited from the session and whether they were able to learn something new from it. This will help you know whether you need to spruce up your presentation before you deliver it again.

Learn more about setting up a poll and let us know how you used polls to understand your audience better. You can also write to us at support@zohobackstage.com with your feedback or questions.

Happy organizing!

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Spotlight 26: Host interactive virtual sessions with Backstage OnAir
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