Using polling and Q&A together

As the tools of the virtual presenter’s trade become more familiar to you, here’s a tactic that can open up some new possibilities.

Sometimes you need to offer an audience a multiple choice option (like a poll), but you face the problem of there 1) being way too many options to fit into the limit of answers the web conferencing tool offers you or 2) you need to give the audience a chance to comment or qualify their vote.

Here’s an example I recently used:

I did an exercise where I asked participants to choose among four options.  In reality, there were a couple dozen ways to answer the question, so I took the four most common answers and turned those into a poll (which automagically labelled them A, B, C, and D).  Then I asked the audience to choose which of the four options (on the poll) was most like the answer they’d written down during the exercise.  And you guessed it, I also offered via verbal instruction the option for them to submit their own description of what they’d written via the Q&A panel.

As I often quip, the virtual presenter must learn to “fly by their instruments” meaning, like a pilot must both learn to fly by sight and their gear, so must virtual presenters learn new ways of doing old things.

Add a trick to your bag.  Consider using polls and Q&A at the same time.

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