Audience Response

Audience Response is a computer based decision processing tool that gathers and analyses data, minimising time required to make decisions and/or prioritise issues.

Meeting participants respond to questions / statements, provide their opinions, and prioritise issues using hand-held keypads. Response graphs are immediately viewable. Bluepoint Solutions has been working with electronic survey systems for eight years. We have used the tool in meetings ranging from only a few participants to 500 and more.

How does Audience Response work?

The system consists of a central computer system, Wireless Keypads and a Radio Receiver.

A meeting template consisting of an agenda and meeting models is created prior to the event. A series of questions and/or statements are presented to the group who then have the opportunity to vote using the keypads.

The results of each vote can be presented after each question, or if preferred at the end of the session. Its takes a matter of seconds for us to calculate the results and display them on a screen.

What are the benefits of using Audience Response?

More productive and potentially shorter meetings; better use of meeting time.
More even / democratic input. Everyone is 'heard'.
Improved participant awareness and understanding of the group / individual positions.
Quick revelation of what people are thinking so that valuable meeting time can be spent on why and what to do about it.
A change in group dynamics from defending 'my' position, to understanding and addressing the 'group' position.
Participants have more fun and feel more involved when keypads are used.
Greater participant buy-in to decisions because they have all been involved.

But is it anonymous?

Yes and no! The system can be configured either way. Sometimes it would not be either desirable or indeed ethical to collect participant data, e.g. during staff surveys, employee opinion surveys etc. However, sometimes, with the consent of participants, it would be very useful to collect participant data. A good example of this would be customer surveys.

How can the data be analysed?

The answer to this is anyway you desire. One of the beauties of the Audience Response system is the way that the data can be cut after or even during the event. For example by asking some demographic questions at the beginning of an employee opinion survey, the results could be cut by department, length of service, gender, grade, manager etc to provide some very powerful analysis.

Does everyone have to be surveyed at the same time or can the surveys be broken down into groups.

Again, Audience Response can be very flexible. We have the ability to consolidate any number of meetings into a group result. An example of this would be a number of Customer surveys taking place over a couple of weeks at various locations could be reported either by session and/or as a whole. By including demographic questions into the survey and consolidating meeting results it is possible to get a departmental, group or location view without everybody attending the same session.

Where can I get more information?