This is where polls and surveys come in.
Polls and surveys are effective engagement tools that allow webinar hosts to interact with all attendees, collect real-time feedback, and provide a more dynamic experience. However, merely adding these elements to your webinar will not solve the problem. You need to use them strategically to get the best results. This often raises the question ‘how to use polls and surveys in hybrid webinars effectively’?
In this blog, we will be exploring how these engagement capabilities can enhance hybrid webinars, the best practices to follow when using them and how to analyze responses to improve your future events. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a clear strategy to make your hybrid webinars more engaging, interactive, and valuable for all attendees.
Why Should You Use Polls and Surveys in Hybrid Webinars?
Below are few reasons why:
1. Encourage Active Participation:
Getting both online and in-person attendees to feel equally engaged is one of the biggest issues for hybrid events. Virtual participants may feel like passive viewers rather than active attendees, whereas in-person attendees might hesitate to raise their hands and ask questions.
Polls and surveys will help you in breaking this barrier. They encourage all attendees to participate in the webinar. Attendees are more inclined to voice their opinions because surveys and polls allow for anonymous responses. As a result, it makes the event more inclusive and interactive.
2. Gather Real-Time Feedback:
You can quickly learn about what your audience is thinking by conducting a poll. For example, you can ask attendees what topics they are most interested in and adjust the content of your webinar according to their interests.
You can also determine their expertise level by observing how they answer specific queries. You can evaluate audience sentiment on a particular topic and customize the discussion to their feedback. This process will ensure that your webinar is interactive and audience-driven, rather than a one-way lecture.
3. Personalize the Webinar Experience:
When you gather information through polls and surveys, you can change your webinar content based on the audience’s wants and needs. For example if most of your attendees identify as ‘beginners’ in a poll enquiring about their skill level, then you can slow down and give more basic explanations.
If your guests show interest in a certain topic, you can spend more time talking about it. This li͏ve tweaking will make your webinar more worthwhile and fun.
4. Assess Audience Understanding:
Polls can be used as quick assessments to ensure that your audience is following along. For example, after covering an important concept of your topic, you can launch a poll to see if all attendees have understood the topic well or not.
If most attendees respond with incorrect answers, you can immediately clarify misunderstandings instead of waiting until the Q&A session.
5. Collect Post-Webinar Insights:
Launching surveys at the end of a webinar will help you determine what worked and what did not. In your survey, you can ask attendees about their overall webinar experience, what they liked and disliked, and what themes they would want to see covered in the future. These insights can assist you in developing future webinars based on actual audience input.
Best Practices for Using Polls and Surveys
Use these best practices to get the most out of your hybrid webinar’s surveys and polls:
1. Keep Your Questions Simple and Clear:
Make sure your survey and poll questions are clear and free of jargon. Complicated wording can confuse participants and result in inaccurate responses.
2. Avoid Combining Multiple Questions:
Asking two things in one question can be confusing. So, stick to one idea per poll or survey question.
Bad example:
What is your favorite webinar format and do you find hybrid events engaging?
A) Yes
B) No
Good example:
What is your favorite webinar format?
A) Virtual
B) In-person
C) Hybrid
Do you find hybrid events engaging?
A) Yes
B) No
The first example above forces the attendees to answer both questions at once, with inadequate answers; whereas the second example separates the two contexts and makes the responses more clearer.
3. Make Questions Relevant to the Webinar Topic:
The content of your webinar and your poll and survey questions must be aligned. Arbitrary or irrelevant questions may cause attendees to become disinterested.
For instance, a survey question about the biggest obstacle participants encounter when working remotely would be pertinent to a webinar on remote work trends. But asking about their favorite weekend activity would be off-topic and distracting.
4. Offer Neutral Answer Options:
Some participants might not have a strong opinion on a particular topic. So, if you force them to choose a side, they might select a random answer, which will affect the accuracy of your data collection.
Include choices like “Not Sure,” “No Preference,” and “Does Not Apply” in place of just “Yes” or “No.” This will guarantee that your webinar’s data collection is more accurate.
5. Limit the Number of Poll Questions:
If you have too many polls, it can feel distracting to the attendees and can also disrupt the flow of your presentation. Hence, a good rule of thumb is to include one poll question every 10-15 minutes, in longer webinars.
6. Provide Clear Instructions:
Some attendees may not know how to participate in a poll. So, before you begin a poll or survey, explain simply how it works. For example, inform guests on where to find the poll and how much time they have to respond. Giving clear directions will guarantee that the maximum participation.
How to Integrate Polls and Surveys into Your Hybrid Webinar
- To integrate polls and surveys into your hybrid webinar you can use webinar platforms that have built-in polling features like Airmeet. Using a robust webinar platform will make it easy for you to create and launch polls during your webinar.
- If your webinar platform doesn’t have polling features, you can use third-party tools to create interactive polls.
- Since hybrid attendees may use different devices like laptops, tablets or mobile phones, ensure that your polling tool works smoothly across all these devices.
Best Timing for Polls and Surveys in a Hybrid Webinar
When you trigger a poll or survey question in your webinar is just as important as how you use them. Here’s are some tips to maximize responses:
- Use polls at the beginning of the webinar. Start your webinar with an engaging poll to break the ice.
For example, you can ask questions like, ‘Where are you joining us from today?’. Asking such questions will help you make your virtual attendees feel included from the start of the webinar.
- Midway through the session use a poll to check audience understanding and re-engage the attendees.
For example, you can ask a question like ‘What’s the biggest challenge you face when hosting hybrid webinars?’. This will keep the audience engaged and also help you in adjusting your content according to your audience.
- Use Post-Webinar Surveys for Feedback:
At the end of your webinar, send out a survey to gather feedback for future improvements. Ask questions like:
- What did you enjoy the most about this webinar?
- What topics would you like us to cover in the future?
- On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate this webinar?
How to Analyze Poll and Survey Results
Once your webinar is over, analyzing the responses will help you make improvements for your future webinars. Here’s how it will help you:
- Look for patterns and trends in the audience responses.
- Compare engagement levels – did virtual and in-person attendees respond equally or not?
- Showing all the participants the poll results will foster transparency.
- If the feedback suggests that attendees want more Q&A time, then adjust your format in subsequent events as per the feedback.
Challenges in Using Polls and Surveys in Hybrid Webinars
While polls and surveys can enhance engagement, they can also come with some challenges. Here’s how you can address them:
1. By ensuring equal participation:
Not all participants may have access to the same tools. So, provide alternative ways to participate, such as allowing in-person attendees to respond via QR codes or text messages.
2. By managing technical issues:
Some attendees may experience issues while accessing polls. So, have a backup plan such as displaying poll questions on slides and allowing verbal responses.
3. By maintaining engagement across locations:
Make sure both virtual and in-person attendees feel involved by reading poll results aloud and discussing them with the audience.
Conclusion
Polls and surveys are powerful tools that can transform hybrid webinars from one-way presentations into interactive experiences. By using them effectively, you can boost audience engagement, collect valuable insights and ensure that both virtual and in-person participants feel equally involved.
Frequently asked questions
To create engaging poll questions you can keep them short and simple, make them relevant to your topic, use clear and conversational language, ask open-ended or multiple-choice questions that encourage interaction.
A good rule of thumb is one poll question every 10-15 minutes to keep engagement high without overwhelming the audience. For a 60-minute webinar, consider 1 poll at the beginning (icebreaker), 2-3 polls in the middle (content engagement) and 1 poll at the end (wrap-up or feedback).
To ensure equal participation, use mobile-friendly polling tools that both groups can access, provide QR codes for in-person attendees to scan and participate and share polling links in the chat for virtual attendees. You can also allow alternative participation methods like hand-raising or verbal responses for attendees facing technical difficulties
Some common technical issues include polls not loading properly, attendees not receiving the poll link, mobile users having difficulty responding and time delays in responses. To prevent such issues, test your polling tool before the event, share it multiple times via chat, email and slides, choose a platform that works well on all devices and give attendees extra time to answer.
