Ideal timing for a poll during a presentation

  • 12 August 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 392 views
J

Howdy. I’m using Slido and loving it. The audience seems to like it too.

 

Tomorrow I’m doing a 90 minute presentation, and I’m using polls/surveys to break up my talking. This serves two purposes: 1. Gives a chance for people to engage; 2. Gives me a second to take a sip of water and mentally get ready for the next section.

 

I’m wondering, in all the experience of members  here, what have you found to be the _ideal_ time to give people a chance to answer the poll. 

I dont think (but am easily corrected) that really the number of people in the session–be it 4 or 56–has much to do with the timing; everyone can read and answer at roughly the same time.

So what is the ideal time to allow as many people to answer the poll as we can get while also keeping the momentum of the talk going?

 

I ask because it seems, using Google Slides, the poll on the screen is the only active one, and you can only have one at a time (unless in a survey), so if you move onto the next slide, people lose their chance to enter their response.

I will test this tomorrow: some of my polls of similar type and complexity will be given different pause times (i’m using a Stream Deck timer to alert me). I’m gonna see which feel better live and as i watch the recording.

 

FEATURE REQUEST: 

I actually wish that were a feature: to be able to keep a poll active while also in Google Slides. Maybe a bookend feature: put the same poll on two different slides: one to activate, and one to then deactivate an show the results. This would be maybe a few slides later.

 

Anyway. Curious: what is the ideal time to pause for responses?

1 reply

Alex
Userlevel 5
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Hi @jeremyB,

Great question - I had a talk with our Chief Meeting Designer, Juraj Holub to see what his take on this is:

  1. As a rule of thumb, allow your participants 5-10 seconds to answer a poll, especially during the first one when some people need extra time to join Slido.
  1. Another thing to keep in mind is that some might have a slower internet connection so again they’d appreciate an extra moment. You can fill in the silence by repeating the joining instructions: “To send your vote, go to Slido and event the event code or just scan the QR code on the screen.“
  1. Another tip is to keep on checking the counter in the top right corner to see how many people already voted. That’s another effective strategy to fill in the time while people are voting and to also increase participation. You can say something like: “I can see that 20 people have already voted. We have 50 people on the call. Let’s try to hit at least 40 votes before we move on.”
  1. The last tip, another from the facilitation area, is to comment on the results as they are changing in real-time. “We can see that 50% of people prefer strawberry ice-cream. Oh wait, vanilla is getting to the lead. Let’s get all the votes in and see what flavour wins.”

 

You’re right, with Google Slides, you can have only one poll open at a time. But from our experience, using these tips, you can maximize the participation and get the most out of every live poll in a very short amount of time without lingering on a single slide for too long. 

 

Let me know how your presentation went and please share any tips of your own - we’d love to hear them! 😊

 

Regarding your feature request, I’ll make sure to pass this on to our product team working on Google Slides. 

- Alex

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