You have designed a stunning Prezi, perfected your speech and now you are ready to rock the room.
But you still feel there is something missing. How can you truly engage your audience and make them feel part of your story?
The truth is, with so many distractions around, it is really challenging to keep your audience’s attention. Here are five ways to use live polls to make your Prezi more engaging:
1. Dance With Facts
Learning facts has never been easy but with Wikipedia we have become even more lenient and delegated names and dates recollection entirely to buzzing servers. Prezi wowed audiences worldwide with how it has radically changed the way data is presented. Facts suddenly have context and become a part of a bigger picture.
Tip
Liven data-loaded Prezi presentations with live polls filled with interesting and attention-grabbing facts. An audience is likely to remember important numbers and names much easier when you let them guess the correct answers. And it’s fun, interactive, and easy to do!
2. Market Research
Until recently, practically the only way you could capture opinions from your audience was to ask them to raise their hands. With hundreds of participants in the room, counting can get a bit tricky. Not to mention that once they put down their hands, all the data is lost.
Tip
Boost your presentation with live polls that capture valuable insights from your audience. The results can be instantly presented to the entire room, making your presentation even more interesting and valuable for everyone. Especially, if you have a room full of experts, the captured insights can be priceless.
3. Instant Feedback
In the age of instant communication, we are losing attention easily and becoming more discriminating about what makes a presentation captivating. It even takes a certain effort to stay focused during a concise 18-minute TED-like talk. Now imagine that you have a 60-minute presentation. Can you feel the sweat pouring down your forehead?
Tip
Split your presentation into smaller 10-15 minute chunks and use instant polls to check after each segment whether your audience understands the content. By including Q&A throughout your Prezi, you can address the most burning questions without disrupting your flow.
4. Let People Choose The Story
For years, we’ve presented ideas in a strictly linear way, from A to Z, from one to ten. Prezi has revolutionized presentations by allowing us to forge our storyline outside of the traditional outline. It’s like a canvas that can be filled with our own tales and rules.
Tip
With Slido, evolve your presentation to another level by passing the steering wheel of your story to your audience. Prepare 2-3 different topics that your audience might be interested in and when you come out onstage, let them decide by voting in the poll which of your stories they’re most interested in learning more about.
5. Turn Your Prezi Into a Dialogue
In the age of social media and user-generated content, people are less willing to just sit and listen. We now expect to be heard and have a chance to participate actively. However, most of the presentations today are still about one-way information transfer, leaving the audience out of the conversation.
Tip
Give a voice to your audience with open-text polls. Whether to generate feedback or brainstorm new ideas, you are more likely to gather better ideas from a larger pool of attendees than allow the three or four participants to dominate the spotlight.
Do you have any other tips how live polls can be used to make presentations more engaging? Please share them with us in the comments below.
