#16: Interactive Presentations: Captivate your audience with a unique delivery
Technology has paved the way for modern presentations’ interactive activities that offer the presenter an immediate and personal connection with the audience. For public engagement, this kind of interactivity helps keep participants actively engaged, enabling you to collect real-time feedback; gamifying information with creative questions, polls, and quizzes can make public presentations memorable and more valuable. For the audience, seeing everyone’s thoughts and opinions in word clouds and poll percentages adds a new dimension to the sense of community and builds rapport with the group behind the presentation.
What is an interactive presentation?
Interactive presentations use technology to solicit, collect and organize information from an audience. For example, a new transportation project presentation could collect inputs using tools and platforms like Poll Everywhere and Reply Systems, which easily gather input and quickly calculate results, reporting them in attention-getting visuals to share with the audience. The added plus? Your audience instantly knows their voices are heard, and their thoughts are seen.
Making a presentation interactive is more than just a gimmick; it can have a real and lasting benefit to projects. Here are just a few examples of how a presentation can become interactive:
Real-time polls of what people value in their neighborhoods
Word clouds of what people think is most important on a new transportation option
Interactive puzzles or maps where people can point to where they’ve identified traffic problems
Better Q&A sessions that enable the audience to submit questions and “up-or-down” comments assess opinion. The creative possibilities of interactive presentations are limited only by imagination and will become more popular as those making presentations become more familiar with the technologies.
In a full-house public meeting for a transportation-oriented development project in White Plains, ASC digital engagement strategists leveraged Poll Everywhere to engage more than 100 attendees, giving everyone a chance to respond to a series of prompts, which produced word clouds and charts, immediately reporting back how the audience perceived various challenges. The more engaged an audience is with a presentation, the more likely they are to feel their voices have been heard, helping encourage support from communities for complex projects and decisions.
What are the benefits of interactive presentations?
What makes interactive presentations worthwhile for public engagement and communication?
Instant feedback. Learning how people feel and responding as appropriate is a crucial part of public engagement. Collecting inputs during a presentation does several things: it lets you know where clarification is needed; it paints a picture of the overarching perspective on your project; it affirms that your organization is listening. You might also consider a before and after poll to get an idea of how effective the presentation was in explaining complex ideas.
Live Brainstorming Sessions. Word clouds and polls can also be used to collect and instantly post ideas during a workshop or breakout sessions (in-person or online), giving organizers a direct line to understanding how a community would like to see a project evolve.
Close the Distance. The past year has made most people much more reliant on presenting online than in person, opening a new channel to remote audiences, enabling them to feel they are a part of the conversation and giving them a seat at the table despite not being physically in the room.
Interact and Act
Presentations are a core activity for public engagement and communications. Adding interactivity in creative, fun, and innovative forms can enhance those presentations, maximize their effectiveness, and add a fun factor that creates memorable experiences for those involved. Though the data may be unvalidated, as compared with more formal surveys, the types of polls and quizzes that can be incorporated into a presentation have latitude in terms of the information they gather and how they engage an audience, ensuring a participatory process that everyone will value.
Interested in having interactive presentations in your outreach? Give us a call today.
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