Audience Participation With Wireless Voting; Corporate Meetings

by Wesley Sutliff


Your annual corporate meeting is finally here and the boss wants you to make sure participation is UP. She wants to know what the employees are thinking about and whether or not they understand the direction the company is headed. And she wants to know now. In short you need to find an Audience Response System.

An Audience Response System (ARS) is the same system used on TV in American Idol or America's Funniest Home Videos. Each member of the meeting will have a wireless handheld device that allows them to select a response and send that response to the system. The ARS will then take all of the responses and calculate the results and display, as needed, to everyone. These systems have been designed to take information from a large population very quickly so that decisions can be made immediately while a topic is being discussed.

Like your annual company meeting of 500 employees (or 1,000 or 10,000).

And not only have audience response systems grown in their ability to handle large numbers of participants, but they have also diversified and specified into different niche markets. For example, some ARS will allow a participant to give a continuous response on a sliding scale over a period of time. Others will allow you to have 10 to even 20 different responses for a given topic or statement. And still others will give you a straight forward YES, NO, or ABSTAIN.

So in order to integrate an ARS into your meeting, you will want to look at a few qualifiers and then match the appropriate functionality to your meeting. Such as:

Reliability Most of today's wireless systems operate on a 2.4GHz Radio Frequency, as do many other wireless devices. So make sure that the location of your event is well protected from outside frequencies that may interfere with your data transmissions.

Ease of Use For many of the participants at your meeting, this may be the first time they have used an ARS, and this means that the system you choose will need to be very UN-intimidating. The wireless devices should be designed in such a way that the users can choose the correct response. For example, for a YES/NO vote a large button highlighted with green and large text spelling "YES" should indicate that this is the button to press should the member want to give a YES response.

**Side Note: Make sure you choose a system that will confirm to the user what their response was, either with an LED or an LCD.**

Battery Life Wireless devices run on batteries, like your remote control, and as live meetings can run for some time you will want to find an ARS with a ling operating time to ensure you won't run out of power in the middle of the meeting. It also helps to find devices that will take standard batteries so that they are easily replaced.

With just these three qualifiers, you'll be able to narrow down your ARS options and know that you will receive a quality system. You will improve the company meeting and most importantly, you'll be keeping your boss happy.

About the Author

Wesley Sutliff is Product Manager of Media Vision USA, the Diplomacy Technology Solution provider in North America including audio conferencing, electronic voting, and simultaneous interpretation solutions for council chambers, courtrooms, boardrooms, and videoconferencing applications