There are some things to consider when running Interactive Sessions at your event. This guide aims to help you think about how you will be running your Interactive Sessions at your event and what, if any, materials or personnel you may need onsite to manage your sessions.
Interactive Sessions Features
Interactive Sessions contains three distinct features, Audience Polling, Live Discussion and Submitted Questions. You can either run one feature by itself, or each feature can work together to create a well-rounded combination of the three.
Audience Polling
Live Polling enables attendees to be surveyed on a number of pre-populated questions. Questions can either be pre-loaded, created on-the-fly, or pulled from Live Discussion and Submitted Questions.
Live Polling questions and results can be pushed to an audience display screen and the attendee App.
Considerations:
- How will attendees access Interactive Sessions?
- What do attendees need to know about Audience Polling?
- What do speakers need to know about Audience Polling?
Live Discussion
Live Discussion can be used to create a social feed specific to a session. Comments from this discussion feed can be pushed to display screens and bookmarked for special action. Bookmarked comments can be sent to a speaker, the display screen, or turned into Live Polling questions for the audience.
Considerations:
- How will attendees access Interactive Sessions?
- What do attendees need to know about Live Discussion?
- What do speakers need to know about Live Discussion?
- Setup Event App with Profile Login
Submitted Questions
Ask a Question has similar features to Live Discussion, however, all questions are moderated before they are seen by other audience members. Bookmarked questions can then by pushed to the display screen to be addressed by the speaker or turned into a live polling question for the audience.
Ask a Question is a good option if you are wanting more control about what content is being shared/discussed amongst attendees. The Live Discussion is a social feed that is visible to everyone using the App, whereas Ask a Question, submits the question to the moderator who can choose to push it to the display screen or not.
A speaker or moderator can pose a question to the audience through the discussion feed, and responses/comments can be added to the display queue to show on the display screen.
Considerations:
- How will attendees access Interactive Sessions?
- What do attendees need to know about Submitted Questions?
- What do speakers need to know about Submitted Questions?
Onsite Management
While you are organising what technology and personnel you will be having onsite, it is important to consider the following:
- Will the speaker be controlling the facilitator panel? If not, who?
- How many devices will be onsite to run the session? E.g. iPads
- Who will be responsible for running Interactive Sessions behind the scenes?
- How many interactive sessions will be running at the same time?
- How many personnel will I need onsite to run my sessions?
What do speakers need to know?
Your speakers will need to know about Interactive Sessions and how they can incorporate it into their presentation. Communication to speakers can include a template to collect Live Polling questions/answers, or collect notes from the speaker detailing how they want the relevant Interactive Sessions feature to be run on the day.
It is important to consider the following:
- What do my speakers need to know about Live Polling?
- What do my speakers need to know about Ask a Question?
- What do my speakers need to know about Live Discussion?
- Do my speakers need to submit questions for Live Polling pre-event?
- Do my speakers need to include instructions in their presentation about Interactive Sessions?
What will your speakers have access to on the day?
- Facilitator Panel - Full control over the session and the ability to create live polling questions on-the-fly, bookmark relevant questions, and turn questions into live polling questions.
- Speaker will require login details and a brief how-to-use the Facilitator Panel.
- Just the App - only what attendees can see with someone else controlling the questions pushing through the App and bookmarking comments etc.
- Speaker will require App login details