I’m constantly asked how to “make my presentations interactive” because people “need to be more engaging”. Let’s set aside the fact that you don’t need to be interactive to be engaging for a moment, and look at how to be interactive – specifically being interactive by using questions – either digitally or physically.
Something to think about first
The kind of tools I’m discussing here tend to need a medium sized audience at least. Small audiences will think they’re silly – and they’re not wrong! If the audience is small enough to judge what people think without any of these tools, then that’s what you should do.
(The only exception to this I can think of is if you want to have an anonymous vote, but that’s pretty darn rare.)
Interactivity via online polls
There are a few of apps out there now that allow your audience to vote on something and for you to embed the results in your PowerPoint. If you get the paid version of most of them you can have those results updated live… and sometimes it looks great, but it’s not all sunshine and roses for this in your presentations.
Physical connectivity during your presentation
It goes without saying that for this sort of thing to work, you need a strong WiFi connection., Remember that lots of your audience will be using it too of course and a hundred people all suddenly hitting the net at the same time can grind things to a halt.
So far, so not-rocket-science… but remember it’s not something you can rehearse, unlike all the other technical bits of your presentation! You can’t simulate that kind of load and nothing kills the point of interactivity if your audience can’t interact and you can’t share their interactivity. (Even Steve Jobs had a problem with this!)
Don’t forget, too, that most people can’t use their smartphones well for anything new. And I mean almost anything! I’ve had people in my presentations literally not know that you could even turn off their smartphone, let alone how to do it! As soon as you ask them to do something with smartphones in your presentation, there’s going to be a five year gap while they do a two minute task. Your presentation’s timing is a risk!
Psychological connectivity
Let’s be brutal here, it’s often hard to get an audience to concentrate during a presentation at the best of times, dragging them away from their phones. So the moment you ask them to use the smartphone to vote, a few bad things can happen.
- You increase their cognitive load – thinking about how to use their phone means your audience has less ‘brain space’ to listen to your content. And that’s bad, obviously, unless your content is so bad you want them to be confused on purpose!
- There’s a break in your flow – any rapport and relationship you’ve built with your audience goes out the metaphorical window. Yes, you can re-establish it, but it’s harder to maintain momentum than to regain it after a stop
- People’s attention is drawn back to the urgent-looking red numbers on their phones. You’ve worked at getting their attention “in the room” so why would you risk it being captured again by something outside the room. Some of them at least will check their emails “just in case”…
In short, think hard about the cost-vs-benefit of being cool and interactive.
Questions as presentation tools
These are safer than the tech options. And let’s face it, most presenters will ask questions of their audience – sometimes seriously, to get feedback or information, or sometimes rhetorically to get people thinking. I’ve got a strong recommendation about what questions to ask in what order.
Basically, start with closed questions.
Why?
Well firstly, open questions make people think (too hard) and if you do that too early in your presentation, your audience will, well “resent it” is too strong a word, but something like that…
More importantly though, anyone in your audience who’s shy, introverted, reserved etc needs to be warmed up. A closed question, where they can raise their hands is a great way to do that.
Extraverts, of course, will wave their hands over their heads in a “look at me” sort of way, but if an introvert raises their hand (or sometimes a single finger) it means the same from their point of view.
Once you’ve got them engaged with the idea of closed questions, think about semi-open questions – so go from black vs white to red-blue-green-yellow-other. And then finally you can move to the open questions you might have wanted to ask, such as “What sort of ideas does anyone have about XYZ?”
Some question variations
If you want something ‘in the room’ that’s a bit more than just raising your hand, but don’t want to go as far as online polls, here are some options for you to think about… It’s horses-for-courses so don’t assume each one works in every presentation
Red Cards
Okay, they can be any colour really, but red works nicely. Holding up cards to show how they’re voting is a bit more fun that just raising hands, and you can have all kinds of options going on at once. For example, half way through a case study, you could ask “If you think they went under, show me the red card; if you think they recovered, show me the blue; and if you think the bounced back better than ever, make it the yellow one”.
Personally I avoid red-vs-greed in case people are colour-blind, but that’s just a personal thing.
Not only is it fun, but if you’ve gone to the trouble of putting coloured cards by everyone’s seat it gives a great impression.
A personal tip is that a long time ago I read some research (so long ago I can’t remember where it is!) saying that people respond positively to higher quality “stuff”, so make it good card, and think about laminating it etc, rather than just using floppy bits of paper.
Clapometres etc
Well these don’t exist, aren’t accurate and feel silly so… oh wait.. what’s a clapometre? It’s a bit of joke where you get your audience to clap according to how much they agree with something – the louder the clapping the more strongly (and more of them) agree with whatever you’re saying at the time.
It’s more fun than it is useful though!
Having said that, I’ve successfully used similar things were I have done something like ask how people feel about topic X – from negative to positive – and set it up so that the left hand side of the stage is where I should be if I was a needle marking “we hate X” and the right hand side is where the needle would point for “we love X”.
Essentially I turn the stage into a pretend dial with me as the needle.
Then I get the audience to do something (almost anything!) to indicate they want me to move from left to right. When they stop doing the thing, I know I’ve reached the consensus point.
Is it cheesy? Hell yes! Cheesy as panto season! Does it work? Often! 🙂
X marks the spot (well twitter as was!)
Rather than use a new app for voting – assuming you want to go that far – why not use something more people have used lots and are familiar with. A 30 second “twitter-fest” can be fun and your phone or laptop can tell you how many times a specific hashtag has been posted. If #pineappleonpizza #yes is posted more times that #pineappleonpizza #no then you’ve got your answer. What’s more, if you’re clever about the first hashtag you use it becomes immediate social media marketing for you and/or whatever you’re speaking at.
The downside of course, is that not everyone has X on their phones (and by the time I publish this Elon Musk may have either bankrupted it or rebranded it again anyway) and not everyone will want to go public with an opinion, but as a fun option it’s worked nicely for me in the past.
Better ideas from your presentations?
If you’ve got other ideas (preferably better ones!) let me know in the comments.
