Scott Rosencrance oversees Research and Development for the Americas Paper Segment at Kemira, a specialty chemical company serving water intensive industries such as paper, oil, gas, mining, and municipal water treatment across the globe. Scott’s organization works to support existing customers. It also works to maintain an active innovation pipeline, with a focus on new chemicals, new formulations, and new applications for their customer base.

 

Seasoned presenters want a two-way street.

Scott presents frequently, both outside and inside the company.  These presentations range from executive team meetings to customer meetings and everything in between.  The groups can be as small as a few people or as large several hundreds.  Often the groups are diverse, including sales, marketing, product management, customers, and technology leadership.

For the past 18 months Scott has incorporated Poll Everywhere into his PowerPoint presentations.  The goal was to increase engagement and get real time feedback. “I like my presentations to be a two-way communication,” he says. “I’m always presenting information.  I find it valuable to find out if the message is relevant and understood, and adapt the presentation as needed to ensure the audience receives the content.”

Get instant feedback from the audience.

Scott adds 10-20 polls to each hour-long presentation. He asks the audience to respond via web and gauges their comprehension of the topics being addressed. When he first started using Poll Everywhere, he asked the following question of several hundred sales team members at an internal sales meeting, to evaluate their reaction to the software.

Besides finding out what they thought about his new presentation tool, he also wanted to measure their interest in deploying it in a sales situation.  The response was clear– the sales teams loved it.

Since then, many of the sales teams have partnered with Scott to incorporate polling in their customer presentations.

Everyone likes to win.

But he doesn’t stop at multiple choice polls. Scott uses Poll Everywhere’s segmentation feature to add a bit of gaming to the mix. He sets up segmentation polls to categorize responses by region and job function. This effectively divides the audience into teams, based on either where they are or what they do. The presentation is now gamified, and everyone wants to win!

Sometimes it takes a few minutes for the crowd to warm up and jump into the conversation. To break the ice, Scott likes to add friendly competition polls, like this one. It breaks the crowd into regions, and then asks them to vote on their football conference picks. Nobody wants to see their favorite lose, so they chime in.  No surprise the North favors the Big 10 while the South favors the SEC!  Everybody makes sure they know how to use the tool and gets involved in a friendly debate… In other words, they are all warmed up.  So when the content transitions to the work at hand they are naturally more engaged and participative.

 

Simplicity, plus flexibility.

To keep things simple, Scott only segments his polls by one variable at a time. But he switches between variables now and then, e.g. regional for one slide and vocational for the next, to keep the competition interesting.

Pause and reflect.

Scott collects data from the polls automatically, as a pivot table in the Poll Everywhere app. After the presentation ends, Scott analyzes the table to find patterns in the responses. He can view each region and job category separately, to evaluate the status of each group he presented to that day.

Scale it up or down.

When you’re a seasoned presentation pro, you learn what works for you and your crowd. As somebody who presents to audiences ranging from a few to several hundred, Scott knows how to keep things competitive, fun, and conversational. Poll Everywhere makes it easier to gamify just about any presentation. “I like how easy it is to use,” he says. “I’m able to engage the entire audience.”