Melissa Forziat is a keynote speaker who encourages event attendees to “Take the Doughnut” (her version of “Carpe Diem”). Before starting her business, Melissa worked in event management for major international sports events, including the Vancouver and Torino Olympic Winter Games, New Zealand Rugby World Cup and the U.S. Olympic Committee. For more information about her motivational or marketing keynotes, visit takethedoughnut.com or check out her at  youtube.com/@takethedoughnut.

When planning an event, you work hard to build a program to benefit your audience. Whether you are trying to educate, motivate, reward or entertain your attendees, your agenda is carefully planned to help achieve your end goal. So, how do you make sure event attendees are staying attentive?

As a keynote speaker with an improv background, I lean on various methods to engage an audience while I speak. This may include inviting volunteers to the stage for participation, posing verbal questions to the audience and responding to their gestures and answers, and giving them postcards (digital or printed) for note-taking to complete as I prompt them with the content. One of my favorite tools, though — and one of the most impactful for the audience — is using live polling.

Live polling may sound complicated, but executing it is relatively simple from an event management standpoint. I use a service that I connect to PowerPoint. As long as my laptop is connected to the internet, the attendees can respond to questions by texting their answers from their mobile phones.

Less tech-savvy audiences tend to have the capacity to text. I like to start with a simple multiple-choice question to ensure everyone is comfortable with how the process works and their own anonymity in their responses before doing word clouds or anything more involved.

Whether your event is onsite, virtual or hybrid, live polling is one type of engagement that works across all venues. As much as I enjoy being able to interact with volunteers on stage, not all events are conducive to this approach. Having a method to interact with an audience that will be reliable no matter your event model is vital for event success.

The versatility of live polling makes it a handy tool to add to your toolkit. At a talk for the women’s empowerment group of FIS Global — a group that had chapters from around the world joining in via watch parties — I presented live to one room of people. Still, I knew that I also had to engage the watch parties and the individuals from around the globe who were tuning in on their own. We opened with a word cloud question about where everyone was located at that very moment, and we were all rewarded with hundreds of responses populating the screen.

The group was instantly connected and excited to watch as new responses were added to the screen. We set the tone from the beginning that I would not talk at them. I was talking with them, and they were chatting with each other.

In an onsite presentation, I watched as a room full of people became riveted by dynamic poll data shifting on screen. As a speaker, I get to hand the content over to them in these moments but do so within a framework to ensure we are still staying on track. When the audience is responding to polls, they are building something together. Their voices are being heard.

Those who finish their responses quickly or who are unable to respond get to be active participants in watching as their fellow audience members continue to collaborate. I have noticed that audiences give complete attention during these portions of my talks, and I believe they do it as a sign of respect to their fellow audience members.

One of the elements I have to consider as a speaker is that different people want to be engaged in different ways. For example, extroverts and introverts typically do not enjoy the same type of engagement.

Live polling bridges this gap and serves as a way to draw in the introverts of the room who might not be comfortable with volunteering, verbal responses out loud or breakout sessions.

I use a live polling platform that keeps responses anonymous, and I have found that — because of that anonymity — people are often willing to share deep thoughts in a word cloud or vulnerable responses to a multiple-choice question that they would not necessarily be comfortable to do if their name or face were attached to it.

Putting live polling questions throughout a single keynote allows me to be nimble in adjusting to how people respond in real-time. I can ask questions based on the material to see what is resonating. I can challenge them with questions that disrupt their preconceptions. I can show them when there is consensus on an issue, which is especially useful if they think they are alone in their viewpoints.

I can also celebrate unique takes or unusual answers to let them know that there is value in our differences. As a speaker, I can work with whatever answers they give me. When an audience sees this happening, they feel more encouraged to contribute. The result? We all become more active with the content.

If planning an event, consider a consistent way to connect with the crowd between speakers or programming. An event host or emcee can do this, but live polling is a component that you can add to keep your event feeling alive in those in-between moments.

One of my favorite aspects of live polling is an element that should be considered: The data you can gather from your event attendees. When I use live polling at an event, I often send the organizers screenshots of the final poll results or spreadsheet reports of the questions I posed.

The data is anonymous, so privacy is maintained, but this can be an exciting way to show an organizer what their audience is thinking. For fun questions, screenshots could be shared in post-event marketing emails. Knowing that you are planning to gather this data may also inspire you to add questions regarding things you want to measure and discuss in your event debrief. What worked? What didn’t? When was the audience engaged? When were they disengaged? Even seeing changes in the volume of responses over the course of an event may help you make decisions about next year’s program.

When you plan an event, you do not want that hard work to be lost to your audience losing focus. Finding easy-to-execute solutions to give them new ways to be involved can make all the difference. The more your attendees feel like they are part of the action, the more they will get from the program you created. C&IT