Holding a presentation, education session or meeting is never a one-way affair. People want their opinions to be heard, ideas to be discussed and have their questions answered. However, managing this type of engagement can often be difficult and even stressful for facilitators.
Mentimeter helps to encourage and manage audience engagement in many ways, including how to receive and answer questions from the audience in an easy way. This feature is called Questions from Audience.
So, if you’re looking for inspiration on how you can actively involve your audience during a Q&A session or similar, you’ve come to the right place.
This article will demonstrate some different scenarios in which you can use the Questions from Audience feature and how to use it at your next presentation!
1. Large audience Q&As
The Questions from audience feature can be a great way to manage Q&A sessions with large audiences. Managing questions from large audiences can be difficult. It requires that there is an assistant to pass a microphone for particularly large audiences, and can overall just be difficult for the presenter to manage.
Instead, use Mentimeter to allow your audience to submit questions to you using their smart device that you can display and answer directly on stage. This means that you don't need to use any extra technology to hold a question and answer session, and everyone gets the opportunity to ask their question.
2. Support your students
Educators can effectively use the Questions from Audience feature to support their students. Often, it can be difficult for students to ask for help, or to have the confidence to ask a question in front of the class. Questions from Audience enables educators to engage with their students to help support them. Educators can see if students have any questions at the end of a lesson, they can also see if the same question has been asked several times. If that is the case, it’s a pretty good indicator that perhaps a certain topic or area needs to be revisited.
3. Group discussions and training
This feature can be used in smaller group discussions, particularly around sensitive topics where perhaps the audience may be nervous about asking questions.
Facilitators can use the Questions from Audience function here in order to encourage participants to ask questions without feeling nervous. That way, facilitators can promote honest and open discussion within the group.
4. More efficient meetings
If you want to make your meetings more efficient, use Question from Audience to minimize disruptions by allocating a specific Q&A session at the end of the meeting.
With Questions from Audience, meeting participants can access the presentation via menti.com and ask their questions to you via their smart devices. This will stop presentation interruptions and questions can be taken at an appropriate time. What’s more is that all the questions that have been asked can be saved, exported and followed up on later if needed, thus helping you to keep meetings concise and limited within the set time frame.
5. Open space technology
Open Space Technology (OST) is a versatile approach to purpose-driven leadership. It enables leaders to host meetings, conferences, corporate events in an audience-driven way.
Question from audience can be used in this type of setting in order to collect ideas and questions from the group in order to build the agenda and achieve the meeting’s purpose. You can learn more about how to use Mentimeter to conduct an OST event by reading this in-depth blog post.
Learn more about Questions from Audience
Take a look at these resources to learn more about how Questions from Audience works:
- Questions from Audience: host the best Q&A sessions ever!
- Learn how to use Questions from Audience
- Questions from Audience: the audience perspective
As always, the best way to experience these features is to create or log into your Mentimeter account and test out the feature!
