Case studies

Interactive voting systems can be used in many situations to gauge audience views and responses to questions, or to measure people’s understanding of a particular topic.

Typical situations are: meetings and conferences; education and training; focus groups; fund-raising events and quizzes. Some examples of how voting systems have been used are listed below.

Case Study 1

A professional services firm was embarking on a change programme and used voting systems to help drive the campaign.

A series of meetings was arranged to deliver the main messages and thrust of the change programme.

Each delegate was given an interactive voting handset and the voting system was used to assess delegates’ reactions to the messages and to focus debate on the issues which were most contentious.

The importance of using interactive voting in this situation is that it enabled all individuals to register their opinions and demonstrated to the audience what the overall response to particular issues really was.

Case Study 2

Helping to integrate a new company structure The decision to aggregate several separate units into one operating division was easy.

However, integrating the units and encouraging them to work together in a complementary way was proving more difficult.

The catalyst for the solution was to organise an event to be attended by the more senior managers of the new division. The audience was seated cabaret style to a pre-determined seating plan and each table was provided with one voting handset to reflect the collective view of each table group.

The design of the event and careful formulation of questions encouraged table-group members to share ideas and to decide on the most appropriate answer to each question.

Case Study 3

Technical knowledge and training effectiveness assessment The company relies on its staff having the detailed awareness of technical issues in order to carry out successful assignments. Each delegate had a specific voting handset assigned to them at the beginning of the 2 day course.

On day 1, the delegates were asked to answer 30 questions relating to specialist technical areas and all individual votes were logged.

The results of the votes in certain areas were used to flex the course agenda to ensure more coverage of topics was included on areas that scored poorly in the overall results.

At the end of the course the same 30 questions were asked and the voting results were displayed alongside the results from the previous day. And yes.

The number of correct answers on day 2 was comfortably higher than on the first day!