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Interactive Meetings - How To Get Started Making Your Meetings and Presentations Interactive with Audience Response Systems

Welcome to the world of interactive meetings!  This site is dedicated to helping you learn how to get started with making your presentations interactive.  And, we'll direct you to some of our partner sites, which provide access to some of the best sales and service companies in the industry. 

What We Really Mean By Interactive Meetings: Interactive meetings are those that incorporate some number interactive presentations, even if it's just one.   And, an interactive presentation is one that utilizes an Audience Response system through which your audience provides feedback to you, the presenter.

What's an Audience Response System?  If you've seen the TV shows "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" or "America's Funniest Home Videos" you have seen an audience response system.  The main component is "keypads". Typically, each person receives one.

At various times during your presentation, you display an interactive question to the audience.  They vote, and a computer generates a graph immediately.  Today, the keypads are typically wireless.  Also, there's a "base station" that gathers the votes and sends them to a computer that is running software.  This 'specialized' software calculates the results, and displays a graph.  

Why You Should Make Every Presentation Interactive:  One of the most common reasons for using an interactive system is to keep the audience alert.  Hey. . .  make them wake up and press a button every once in a while!  Beyond that though, it is incredibly interesting to see the audience's opinion on-screen.  And no one loves to see it more than the audience themselves.

Depending upon your presentation topic, you could quite easily ask a few questions to determine the group's level of knowledge on each subject that you plan to present.  Then, if it seems that they are more knowledgeable in an area than you thought, spend less time there.  If they're less knowledgeable, spend more time.   

If you need to know your audience's opinion, there's no better tool.  And certain types of presentations like: market research, clinical rater testing, strategic planning, product knowledge testing, and employee or customer surveys lend themselves especially well to this technology.

Most important, if you have business issues to discuss with the group, this technology allows you to view the graph and verbalize a follow up question like: "can anyone tell me why 37% of us feel we are performing poorly on this issue?"   Then, get some wireless microphones out there.  Discussion will abound, guaranteed.

If you are planning to rent a system, please visit our network partner, audience-response-rentals.com where you can get price quotes from some of the very best Audience Response rental companies, instantly online.  The site also allows you to place an order right from the quote, and then creates an entire project file for you, online.  That means you have access to enter logistics, or to view project details anytime, from anywhere.