6 Creative Ways to Use Live Polls at Your Events
Keeping your audience engaged throughout your event is crucial for its success, regardless of whether it’s an in-person, virtual, or hybrid event.
One of the best ways to engage your audience and gather vital feedback, is to use live polls and surveys.
In this article, we’ll explore 6 creative ways you can use live polls to transform your next event.
🎉 Add live polls & transform attendee engagement at your next event with EventMobi!
Use Polls and Surveys to Plan Your Event
Don’t wait—you can start using live polls to your advantage well before your event takes place.
Through your event app, social media pages, or email list, ask attendees:
- What are they looking forward to?
- What programming do they want to see?
- What topics are they interested in?
- Which activities are they hoping to participate in?
- Who are they hoping to hear speak?
- What are they curious about?
- What do they want to get out of the event?
By incorporating their feedback into your planning, you’ll give your audience a fully personalized experience they won’t soon forget.
Empower Speakers With Hot Topics
Much of the success of your conference hinges on the speakers, hosts, and entertainers who run sessions at your events. As an event planner, it’s your job to equip speakers with the tools they need to delight your audience.
Encourage speakers to use live polls and surveys during their presentations! That way, they can gather feedback and insights from the audience in real time. This will help them adjust their presentations to deliver content that speaks directly to the audience’s curiosities.
For example, speakers can use surveys and live polls to:
- Turn a speaking engagement into a game of trivia
- Host a live debate, and let the audience vote on compelling arguments
- Pose thought-provoking questions from other event sessions
- Host a post-session quiz to recap the main takeaways
Related: 7 Tips for Leveraging Your Event Speakers as Advocates
Speakers can also use the Q&A function to gather questions after their presentation or answer them on the fly. This is vital for virtual or hybrid events, where your speaker isn’t in the same room as their audience.
Gather Valuable Feedback at Every Stage of Your Event
Live polls and surveys aren’t just for audience engagement—they’re also great for gathering feedback about your event.
With a tool like EventMobi’s live polling and survey features, you can easily gather valuable data about your audience, like:
- Which sessions they enjoyed
- What they wanted more of
- What would have improved the event
- Feedback on your staff and service reps
- Feedback from vendors and sponsors
This kind of information is crucial for improving ROI and making even more successful events in the future.
Use Live Polling to Simplify the Q&A Format
Live Q&A sessions are some of the most engaging parts of an event, but they’re also challenging to manage! With live polls and surveys, you can simplify the Q&A format, taking the pressure off your hosts and making it easy for attendees to participate.
You can also use live polls to gamify elements of your event, like the folks who run JNF Tech Shuk in Toronto. Their event audience included a number of promising Canadian and Israeli tech startups, who had a chance to compete on the event’s unique version of Sharktank, called Lion’s Den.
The startups set up their tables down the middle of the room, their products and company on display as the crowd and “Lions” (aka accomplished business mentors) toured the room.
Later, using EventMobi’s live polling feature, the crowd had the power to decide which startup would get a chance to pitch their business to the Lions.
And if that wasn’t enough pressure on the startups, Tech Shuk turned up the heat by displaying the results on the big screen for a whole hour, so the voters and startups could see who was the crowd’s favorite as votes came in.
Provide Talking Points for 1:1 Networking
Networking is one of the primary reasons people attend events, and your audience’s rate of satisfaction often correlates with how many valuable new connections they made.
As an event planner, your job is to make it easy for attendees to network—including helping them overcome the sometimes-awkward moments of networking.
By providing attendees with thought-provoking live poll results and audience-generated questions throughout your event, you’ll give them plenty of kindling to ignite meaningful conversations.
With the right event networking app, you can then create many opportunities for attendees to discuss your talking points, including:
- Private DMs
- Scheduled meetings
- Breakout rooms
- Social collaboration
- Group discussions
Use Live Poll Results in Your Marketing Strategy
If you want to get the most ROI out of your event, then you’ll use the assets created during their event to fuel your marketing strategy for months after the event comes to a close.
This includes your live poll results, which can be used in a number of ways to extend the lifespan of your event. For example:
- Use the data to publish a research paper
- Create blog posts around survey answers and results
- Integrate survey responses into testimonials
- Share results with your social following and email subscribers
- Design infographics showcasing your results
- Highlight poll results in marketing for future events
This content can keep your attendees engaged between events and even help generate new leads for your next event.
From planning to feedback collection to networking and marketing, live polling and surveys are versatile features that can be used throughout every stage of your event.
Wanna see how EventMobi’s live polling and survey features can boost your event engagement 🙌? Get started by booking your personalized demo of EventMobi today!