What is audience engagement, and how do I do it?
f you’ve ever found yourself drifting off in a work meeting, you’re not alone — in fact, 1 in 3 meeting participants admit to checking social media and texting during work meetings. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Many seasoned presenters will tell you, the answer to this long-time struggle is audience engagement.
What is audience engagement?
Audience engagement is the intentional strategy to interact with the audience and turn them from passive spectators to active participants. Audience engagement aims to create a dialogue or conversation and facilitate discussions between the audience and presenter.
During a presentation, typically people are only expected to passively listen. However, audience engagement encourages the audience to actively engage and get involved. Some potential benefits of audience engagement are:
- It creates a positive experience for the audience
- Increases knowledge retention
- Checks understanding and discovers any knowledge gaps or pain points
- Creates an inclusive culture and gets diverse opinions
- Get instant feedback which helps to tailor the presentation and improve for the future
What is an audience engagement platform?
An audience engagement platform or audience interaction tool is a software tool used to help presenters interact and engage with their audience through live polls, quizzes, surveys or Q&A sessions to get real-time input. Audience engagement tools can be used in both face-to-face and online sessions and allow participants to respond to live questions on a device and get responses in real-time.
Audience engagement platforms are a great way to help facilitate interactivity and create engagement between speaker and audience. It can help to keep the dialogue open between presenter and audience whilst facilitating conversations. An audience engagement platform can be used in meetings, conferences, events, training sessions or educational settings.
Mentimeter facilitates audience engagement and makes audience interaction easy. Mentimeter brings interactivity to presentations allowing the presenter to gain valuable feedback, answers, opinions, ideas or answer questions from attendees.
Here comes the million-dollar question...
How can I engage my audience?
The answer is pretty simple, use Mentimeter of course! But seriously, one of the biggest distractions for most attendees whether in a meeting, training session or class is their mobile phones. Instead of begging the audience to put their phones away or turn them on silent, why not use them to your advantage?
Mentimeter allows the audience to connect to the presentation via their smartphone or other smart device and respond, ask and react to the interactive questions. Not only that but Mentimeter provides a holistic approach to presenting. Before preparing for a presentation, you can use it to engage the audience through interactivity and follow up, get feedback, and analyze data.
Here is some inspiration to help engage your audience whether you are in the same room as them or online:
Use an Icebreaker
Grab their attention right from the get-go with an icebreaker. Whether it is a random question or something more thought-provoking, it will be sure to wake them up and get them involved.
Icebreaker
Free time wordcloud
Meeting Check-In
Set expectations
Setting expectations before a meeting, training session or class is essential so that attendees know what they will get out of it. By asking people to contribute to the session, it helps make them feel part of the presentation, and you can also use the information to tailor the presentation to their needs.
Manage Audience Expectations
Have fun
Break up a meeting and liven up a session. It doesn’t all have to be so serious. A fun quiz can help to revive the audience and get them back focused on the presentation. It is also a fun way to test knowledge and assess a class on a particular topic.
Space Quiz
Company Quiz
Feedback and reflection
Learn where there are gaps for improvement as well as reflect on what has happened. The anonymity Mentimeter provides helps attendees to give honest feedback while providing a safe space to share opinions. This, in turn, helps the presenter gain meaningful knowledge to improve continually.
Reflect on Risks and Pain Areas
Formative Assessment for Physics
Prioritize questions
Q&A’s can be overwhelming, but with Mentimeter, the audience can upvote questions which avoids duplicated questions clogging up the Q&A. You can also see the most asked questions, which helps to prioritize what to answer first. Other than that, you can moderate Q&A’s with the Mentimote meaning you can skip any irrelevant or unwanted questions.
