Option Technologies Blog

How to Enhance Your Meeting With An ARS And Other FAQS.

Written by Gia Domenico | Wed, Oct 07, 2015

There are many uses to an audience response system and even more ways to enhance a meeting with one. You can: use it to play games within PowerPoint, conduct surveys to gage employee satisfaction, test understanding of a new concept, and get honest feedback on ideas and projects.   

The Group Competition Module has PowerPoint game templates that may be edited quickly to allow the client to make last minute changes to substance of the questions if a new topic of concern arises prior to the meeting. This provides more flexibility than some other game-based learning systems or software and becomes a simple way to develop a training game for employees. This system is also fully integrated into PowerPoint to keep the learning curve at a minimum, as many are already familiar with the way that PowerPoint runs through previous experiences. It is also designed to be as simple as possible for participants so that time is not wasted at the start of the meeting. Users simply hit the button on the keypad that corresponds to the answer they believe is correct on the screen.

The Employee Survey Module generates specialized reports from the audience survey to best present the data on employee satisfaction to different organizational hierarchies.  The module helps to gather accurate information as all responses are kept anonymous so that employees do not have to worry about whether their responses may impact their standing with the company.

Results for particular questions can be saved and exported in spreadsheets to be reviewed later or compared to previous survey results.  This can show growth or higher levels of understanding between groups.  The data may even be reviewed immediately to show if participants may need to review a topic again or if it is time to move onto the next segment of the presentation.

The guarantee of anonymity encourages honest feedback from participants.  However, the keypads may also be assigned to specific participants and it can be recorded who voted and what they chose to vote for on each issue in rostered votes.  This can be helpful when taking note of which employees have the highest understanding of company procedure or product information.

 

How the handsets work:

All of our handsets are battery operated radio transceiver technology that talk back and forth using radio signals to a base station. Each handset is a radio transceiver; they communicate with a base station, which is plugged into your computer. A base station is typically plugged in through a USB port or Ethernet connection. The system is very fast and scalable. With our current models, the OptionFinder® G4 and Micro 4, you can communicate with 200 keypads per second. The audience takes a keypad, presses a button to vote, the vote is transmitted and acknowledged by the base station, an acknowledgement message then appears on the screen of the keypad.

Our system is a two way communication system between the keypads and their respective base stations. This allows the audience to feel confident that their vote has been tabulated as they intended. The system will not send an acknowledgement message to the keypad without the vote being counted.

 

Can I vote from my phone:

You don’t have to have keypads as part of a polling project. You can have the entire audience use their own devices as long as they have a recent browser. We can make that happen with just a software solution so that people using their own devices over the internet can have their votes tabulated. The Virtual Interactive Participate system will immediately tabulate, store, and produce reports to show you the results of the responses.