Monthly Archives: December 2010

Add value to your event with Audience Response

Posted on December 30, 2010 by | Comments Off

Audience response systems can add a great deal of value to your conferences and events. Mark Kisby explains how…

During the recent ‘Credit Crunch’ organisations were under pressure to cut their conferences and events budgets. What they saved by reducing the size of the stage or by going to a cheaper venue shouldn’t have effected the basic content of the day or the goals for staging the event in the first place. Audience response systems (ARS) were often cut early in the budget review but this can be a mistake as an audience response system will add tremendous value by giving tangible results and feed back from delegates attending.

An ARS can show whether or not the key the aims of staging an event have been met or not, it can reveal any sticking points. This allows your event to measure its effectiveness during the day and give evidence of its success to all the stakeholders.

Audience Response Voting Keypad

Audience Response Voting Keypad

Audience response can also maximise the available time at an event by asking delegates which themes are of most interest, so allowing you to apportion time appropriately. It costs a lot to get every one in one place so it makes sense to ensure their time together is as productive as possible.

Using these systems also sends a clear message to the attendees, that ‘we are listening and your opinion is valued’.  Presenters in the dreaded post lunch grave yard slot will appreciate the regenerative powers of asking a flagging delegate a question on which they need to ponder before responding.  ARS has been proven to increase retention on the subject polled and certainly your chair person will marvel at the ARS’s capability to break the ice during Q&A sessions and promote delegate interaction as they begin to discuss options with their neighbour, so leading to improved networking.

Asking post event evaluation questions at the end of the last session will save your staff days of data input from a paper based questionnaire.

So how do they work? In its basic form an audience response system comprises of a display to present the question and a range possible options / answers, and a ‘keypad’ to allow the delegate to select the option / answer which best matches their opinion.

The results of the poll are displayed immediately after the close of the 10 second voting slot. The equipment is usually radio based and wireless so allowing free distribution amongst an audience.

Some systems also offer the ability to communicate directly with the presenter through the ’free text submission’ of questions so allowing the delegate to ask their own question, or submit an idea, rather than just responding to predetermined options.

All in all if the budget is being trimmed it pays not to cut the one item that can prove the days effectiveness and show value has been obtained for the spend. If you are still looking for ways to save, go for the cheaper dessert option, cut the sparkling water and have a smaller lighting rig!

AVD can supply a range of Audience Response Systems including:-
Voting Keypads
Mini Voting Keypads
Deletext – SMS
Deletext – Engage

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Posted in Audience Response, AV Department, Deletext, Hire, Presentation Tips, SMS, Voting

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When is a Laptop not a Laptop?

Posted on December 21, 2010 by | Comments Off

Why you should consider hiring a laptop for your presentation, conference or event. Mark Kisby goes through some of the pit falls in using an office based laptop for a presentation.

When is a laptop not a laptop? When the laptop you want is a ‘presentation laptop’ and the one you have is an ‘office laptop’… there is a difference in the settings if not in the physical machine. Usually a corporate laptop will have been configured to an IT policy which prevents you from adjusting such things as screen resolution, external monitors, and power saving settings. All these settings are required to be reset for your presentation but unless you have ‘administrative rights’ you may come a cropper.

You need to set your power settings to ‘Presentation’ which will set your Monitor, Hard Disks, System Hibernate and System Standby to ‘Never’. Failure to do so may result in you running back to the laptop to wiggle the mouse to prevent the screen going blank and the PC starting to hibernate… this might restore the image to the laptop screen but now the projector has dropped out and  you need to find that function key again that toggles between screen set ups… and where was I… meanwhile the audience is now thinking… ‘Very slick, do we really want to buy from this person?’

Screen savers kicking in mid flow are to be avoided, presentations interrupted by star fields and family photos stick in the mind for all the wrong reasons. (Nice swim suit by the way…?)

Screen resolution is another potential pit fall. If using a small form factor PC like a netbook you may find that if you simply ‘mirror’ the screen, i.e. you have the same image on both laptop and projector, you may find the image on projector differs or distorts as the native resolution of the projector differs to the PC’s screen. To rectify this you need to  adjust the image size of the second screen. This again requires administrator rights to change.

Both these settings, for a Windows PC, are accessed by right clicking on the desk top and selecting ‘Properties‘:-

For power and screen saver settings.. select the ‘Screen Saver‘ tab. Set the Screen Saver to ‘None‘ then go on and press the ‘Power…‘ button. In ‘Power Schemes‘ select ‘Presentation‘ or set all to ‘Never‘, and then ‘Apply‘.

For resolution settings… select ‘Settings‘ tab. Click and select the ‘2nd‘ monitor, adjust the screen ‘resolution slider’ to match the projector’s native resolution. And ‘Apply‘ It will ask you if you wish to keep these settings. If not then wait 15 seconds and they will revert to as before.

We hope this helps, an easy alternative is to just hire a presentation laptop from us… job sorted. :-)

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Posted in AV Department, Field Stories, Hire, Presentation Tips

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It’s sNOw Problem to Present in Glasgow from Orkney

Posted on December 20, 2010 by | Comments Off

Snow Problem for AVD!

As the weather conditions across the country continues to wreak havoc with  conference schedules, not all delegates and speakers have the option to brave the conditions. For one speaker due to present at Holyrood’s Domestic Abuse conference last week, the trip from Orkney to Glasgow was a bridge too far. A last minute flight cancellation left her stranded on the island with no way of travelling down to give her presentation.

The question was then posed to the technical team on site “Is there anything you can possibly do to allow our speaker in Orkney to present live, here in Glasgow?” Our man on site Brian Drummond tells the story.

As lunch time arrives the event organiser breaks the news to me that the final speaker of the day has had travel problems and will need to be dropped from the programme unless we can do something to help. After a couple of minutes head scratching, a plan was hatched. Robbie the venue’s stage manager had an iphone and suggested that the jack output of the iphone could be used to send the audio to the mixing desk, allowing the presenter on the phone to be heard through the PA.

This was good but did not allow for two way communication with the speaker on the phone. To get around this problem and to allow the conference chair to speak to the presenter live while chairing the conference, I utilised our DIS discussion system to its fullest. The discussion system uses push to talk microphones which have little speakers on the base unit.

So I was able to send the audio from the auditorium floor to the speakers on the microphone base unit. I had one of the microphones at the tech position, and because of the excellent RF screening properties of the discussion system I was able to have the iPhone in proximity to the microphone and speaker without inducing the dreaded mobile phone interference.

“This meant that the sound from the auditorium was now being routed through the phone and the chair could now speak directly to the speaker in Orkney. All we had to do now was inform the speaker in Orkney that we had come up with a solution and she could now give her presentation from the comfort of her warm living room. Her presentation slides were emailed through and run when cued.

The whole presentation was a complete success and everything thing ran smoothly. It worked so well in fact that we kept the speaker on the phone for the panel discussion including questions from the audience at the end. When asked a question or taking part in the discussion we displayed a picture of the speaker on the big screen so that the audience could put a face to the voice they were hearing through the PA.

Not too bad at all for thinking on your feet and using what equipment we had to hand. If word gets out everyone will want to present from home :-)

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Posted in Audience Response, Audio, AV Department, Field Stories, Hire

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AVD helped raise over £21,000 for good causes when Bovis engaged them to provide a silent auction service to their annual charity fundraiser despite travel chaos. Mark Kisby takes up the story… Looking out the window and listening to the radio the … Continue reading →

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Posted on December 15, 2010 by