Even with all the practice and preparation in the world, there’s always that moment of anxiety when it’s time to put on a presentation. Do you have your material or flow of the meeting arranged in a way that captures people’s attention? One of the biggest challenges that presenters face is trying to keep the audience engaged. Interactive tools that involve audience participation, like quizzes and polls, are a great way to keep your presentations engaging.

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Let’s examine how these tools help keep audiences focused on your presentation.

Why Are Polls and Quizzes Effective?

One of the best ways to intellectually stimulate people at a presentation is by getting them to answer questions. Don’t wait until the end of the presentation to start the Q&A session, you risk losing the audience. Everyone may be more focused on heading out the door than engaging in a back-and-forth after a long session.

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Adding quizzes and polls as a Q&A technique throughout the presentation can keep everyone engaged from start to finish, avoiding lulls that may lose your audience. Quizzes also reinforce the ideas you’re covering, boosting the chances of your audience leaving with a deeper understanding of the topics you covered during the session.

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Using quizzes to turn audience members into active participants increases your chances of holding their attention. Quizzes also guide presenters to collaborate and engage instead of going off on non-related tangents. Finally, you can gauge just how much your audience absorbed from your presentation and collect feedback on ways to make improvements.

Importance of Interactive Presentations

If you’ve ever watched a great TED Talk or keynote speech, what makes it stand out is how the visuals trigger enthusiasm in the audience. No matter how passionate the presenter is about the subject, it’s difficult for people to sit through a never-ending stream of static text and images.

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Quizzes go a long way toward reinforcing a topic and help you impart that information to your audience. They’re also a great way to set the mood as icebreakers at the beginning of a meeting and prepare the audience for what’s to come. For example, you can start a presentation with a poll asking people to rank which topics they are most enthused about.

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Alternatively, you can give the audience a chance to provide feedback or praise. For example, you can ask everyone to say something positive about one team member and then turn the responses into a word cloud. Starting a presentation on a happy note leaves audience members more relaxed and ready to fully engage.

Poll and Quiz Types

Below are some examples of polls and quizzes you can use to enhance your presentations.

Multiple-Choice Quizzes

Multiple-choice quizzes pose a question to an audience and then give them multiple options to choose as an answer. They’re great for determining what listeners have absorbed from the presentation at different points.

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Pros:

• They’re quick and simple.
• You can fit in more questions.
• They look great on a screen.
• It’s easy to analyze the answers.

Cons:

• They take more time to create.
• They don’t provide you with deep insights as compared with other options
• Responses are limited to the options presented.

Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions are structured in a way that can't be answered with a simple yes or no. They give audience members time to reflect on what they learned during the presentation and then provide a response that includes their feelings, ideas, or opinions.

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Pros:

• They help you gain a deeper understanding of your audience.
• They provide you with unlimited possibilities for responses.
• They give you more detail into what your audience thinks and feels.
• They let you monitor how listeners feel from the start of your presentation to the end.

Cons:

• They can take a lot of time to answer.
• They might get fewer responses.
• It may be harder to analyze the results.

Surveys

Surveys can contain multiple-choice and open-ended questions that are designed to collect information from participants. In addition, they provide valuable data you can review later to learn what points went over well in your presentation and where you might want to refine things.

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Pros:

• They allow you to collect a lot of information from participants.
• They’re easier to use for statistical analysis.
• You can collect a broad range of data.

Cons:

• Respondents might provide inaccurate answers.
• They leave room for unclear responses.
• They may be more prone to certain errors.

Personality Quizzes

Personality quizzes give you more insight into the personality types in your audience. They’re also good for learning more about listeners’ preferences. Using personality quizzes allows you to make your presentation more personal for listeners.

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Pros:

• They help you understand respondents better.
• They remove certain biases.
• They can make the experience better for attendees.

Cons:

• They can be time-consuming to complete.
• They may not be appropriate for all presentations.
• The audience might not provide accurate responses.

True-or-False Quizzes

True-or-false quizzes present a statement and then leave it to audience members to determine whether it is true. Many presenters use such quizzes to gauge how much information people have absorbed about a certain topic.

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Pros:

• They’re faster for respondents to get through.
• They make it easier to ask more questions.
• It’s easier to analyze the responses.

Cons:

• Respondents may provide answers without fully comprehending the questions.
• It’s hard to gain deeper insights into the audience.
• They take more time to create, since they relate to the presentation/meeting topics.

Tips on Using Polls and Quizzes in Presentations

There are many options when it comes to technology that can make presentations more interactive. However, while the bells and whistles are nice, it’s vital that you understand how to leverage polls and quizzes to keep the audience engaged from the start of your presentation to the end.

1. Explain the Purpose of the Quiz

Make sure audience members understand why they’re being asked to participate. Give them insight into how things work to avoid confusion. In addition, participants should clearly understand how the results will be judged.

2. Come Up with a Game Concept

Instead of presenting your quizzes in a straightforward manner, turn them into a fun game. For example, you could encourage audience members to participate in a Jeopardy-style format in which they must provide the correct answer in the form of a question. In addition, you can enhance the experience by setting up a leaderboard or a scoreboard and incentivize participation by giving the winner a small prize.

3. Make the Questions Relevant

The polls and quizzes you use during your presentation should be tied directly to your topic. Even though you want everyone to have a good time, don’t lose sight of your goals. You want the audience to leave the session with a solid understanding of the critical concepts you covered.

4. Integrate Different Quiz Types

Try to mix things up by incorporating varying quiz styles. For example, you might start your presentation by warming the audience up with true-or-false questions, ease into a multiple-choice format, and then shift to an open-ended question session to encourage more free-flowing conversations.

5. Send Quizzes for Pre-Meeting Preparation

You can also send out quizzes to audience members before your session. That way, participants have more time to think over their responses. You can incorporate the feedback into your presentation, making it more relevant to your audience.

Successfully Using Polls and Quizzes

Gamification is an excellent way to turn dry material at an all-hands meeting into something the audience finds enjoyable. We already touched on turning quizzes into a Jeopardy-style competition. Asset manager FS Investments did something similar using VPOLL technology.

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When the company held an employee compliance review session to provide updates on industry regulations and best practices, it bypassed the keynotes in favor of setting up an interactive game environment. The technology allowed participants in the room and those working remotely to engage in a hybrid meeting format. As a result, business leaders got the chance to educate workers in a fun way while fulfilling their obligations.

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Inno-Versity did something similar for its cybersecurity awareness training. Instead of presenting users with a bunch of dry slideshows and ending with a basic test, the company set up modules that constantly challenged participants with questions from real-world scenarios they might face.

Go Beyond the Basics with Your Presentations

Polls and quizzes take your presentations to the next level at team meetings, webinars, or training sessions. These interactive tools and visual aids help you facilitate meaningful discussions and create memorable experiences for audience members.

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VPOLL's software lets you set up quizzes and polls that adapt to different presentation styles, including gamifying activities for more engagement. Our technology helps organizations connect more deeply with their audiences using interactive quizzes that are accessible from both desktop computers and mobile devices. Learn how to leverage the power of the VPOLL platform to increase audience engagement by scheduling a demo today!

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