Surveying your audience before a presentation can help you tailor your content, style, and delivery to their needs, expectations, and preferences. But how do you design and conduct an effective pre-presentation survey? Here are some tips and techniques to help you get the most out of your audience analysis.
Depending on your context, purpose, and resources, you can use different methods to survey your audience before a presentation. Some of the most common ones are online surveys, phone interviews, focus groups, and observation. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, so you need to weigh them carefully and choose the one that suits your situation and goals. For example, online surveys are convenient, fast, and cheap, but they may have low response rates and limited interaction. Phone interviews are more personal, but they can be time-consuming and intrusive. Focus groups are useful for exploring complex issues, but they can be expensive and difficult to organize. Observation can provide rich insights, but it can also be unethical or impractical.
Let's be real - you can't always access your audience to do a survey. Instead, have a persona construct of who will be attending: e.g. - Engineer with x years of experience - Struggling with problems xyz - Looking to learn about x Literally go to Linkedin or your network and seek out these people. Ask them one or two questions to get a sense of what might work as a topic. Surveys don't always give the full picture.
Most of the virtual presentation tools include reactions and poll functionality. You can also use PowerPoint Live Presentations which allow interaction with the presentation to show up on the screen. Tools like Kahoot give polling options as well!
In my experience, having general information about the profiles of your audience in advance can be helpful, especially if it’s a company internal presentation or industry based presentation. However where you have to make a presentation to a very mixed multitude, you can check at the start of the presentation by asking questions about their expectations. That can help you tailor how you present your content to the audience, you will be able to get a feel. You have to be flexible to adapt on the go in this scenario.
By simply asking what people want to hear more of, for instance on an upcoming webinar, will make the whole presentation more engaging and valuable for everyone. You can do that with a simple poll on LinkedIn. Just keep questions easy and quick to answer, the less effort people have to put in, the better. You can keep more detailed questions for the survey after the presentation. So, quantitative surveys are great but consider to exchange in a more "qualitative" in depth interview as well where you can explore why people are interested in a certain aspect of upcoming your presentation. In the end you can also combine both methods.
My survey method is simple. At the end of the presentation, I ask if they want us to come again a year from that day. All have said yes and some have requested for us to come back in 6 months or less. I tried phone calls and emails and found that to not work well. Also, tried polls and that did not work well either.
Before you create your survey questions, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to learn from your audience. What are the main objectives of your presentation? What are the key messages you want to convey? What are the potential challenges or opportunities you face? What are the gaps or assumptions in your knowledge of your audience? Based on these questions, you can define your survey objectives and decide what type of information you need to collect. For example, you may want to find out about your audience's demographics, background, interests, attitudes, expectations, or preferences.
Giving too many choices for data points can lead to no clearly defined pattern or cluster in responses. If you ask about interests or experience open ended, lots of different responses. If you ask do you have experience: yes/no or to rate your experience as novice, intermediate or advanced, results may cluster around one or two choices. Same thing with interests - asking what would they pick from two or three choices, results may cluster.
It’s also important to align your objectives to broader organizational goals: If your survey is part of a larger initiative or project, ensure that your objectives align with the broader goals of your organization. This will help create a cohesive and strategic approach to gathering insights. Additionally, you should prioritize objectives: If you have multiple objectives, prioritize them based on their importance and relevance to your survey. This will help you focus your efforts and resources on the most critical areas. Lastly, keep objectives realistic and attainable: by setting objectives that are realistic and attainable within the scope of your survey. Consider the resources available to you, such as time, budget, etc.
Once you have your survey objectives, you can start designing your survey questions. To ensure that your questions are clear, relevant, and unbiased, use simple and precise language. Avoid leading, loaded, or double-barreled questions. Additionally, closed-ended questions are better suited for quantitative data and open-ended questions for qualitative data. You can also use rating scales or Likert scales to measure attitudes or opinions, while multiple-choice or check-box questions are better for measuring preferences or behaviors. Furthermore, consider using skip logic or branching to customize your survey based on previous answers. Lastly, limit the number and length of your questions to avoid survey fatigue.
In my experience, doing a couple of mock interviews will help fine tune the quality as well as the direction of the questions.
Microsoft Forms gives you an average time spent filling out a form, you can shorten the complexity or number of questions easily - even add branching logic.
Before you send out your survey to your audience, you need to test it for validity, reliability, and usability. You can do this by conducting a pilot test with a small sample of your target audience or by asking a colleague or a friend to review your survey and provide feedback. This will help you identify and fix any errors, ambiguities, or biases in your survey design. You can also use this opportunity to check the technical aspects of your survey, such as the format, layout, accessibility, and compatibility with different devices and platforms. After you have tested and refined your survey, you can distribute it to your audience using the method you have chosen. You can use email, social media, websites, or other channels to invite your audience to participate in your survey. Make sure you provide a clear and compelling introduction, a clear and concise consent form, and a sincere and polite thank you note.
Microsoft forms can be used anonymously or validate an identity. You can allow the participant to receive a copy of their responses.
Three things top my mind 1- Make them run on the stop, this will warm them up 2- when it's time for food let them go EAT! 3 - know your audience, a little poll will give you an insight especially online
Analyzing and using your survey results is the final step in surveying your audience before a presentation. You can utilize different tools and techniques to process, organize, and interpret your data, depending on the type and amount of data you have collected. Descriptive statistics, charts, graphs, or tables can be used to summarize and visualize quantitative data. Thematic analysis, coding, or categorization can be used to identify and explore patterns and themes in qualitative data. Cross-tabulation, correlation, or regression can be used to examine the relationships and effects among different variables. The main goal of your analysis is to draw meaningful and actionable insights from your data that will help you improve your presentation. You can use these insights to adapt your content to audience needs, adjust your style to their preferences and personalities, enhance delivery to their attention span and learning styles, anticipate questions or objections, establish rapport and credibility with them, and evaluate the impact of your presentation. Surveying your audience before a presentation is a valuable practice that can help create more engaging presentations. By following these tips and techniques, you can design an effective pre-presentation survey that will help you understand and connect with your audience better.
Microsoft forms gives information in visual form when possible - pie charts, Word clouds, graphs, etc. with options to drill down to actual responses.
but with the pace data and visualization is moving... it seems Microsoft is lagging far behind.. Microsoft need to do lot of hard work to cope up with that... once a market leader .. its sad to see it this way
If they are in there for a reason - Mark out a few 5 points which are are among the top reasons why a person could decide to attend the session. Ask out aloud these questions and take live response with a yes or no or May be. or round a count of raised hands..
I believe the thing that affects presentations the most is our attitude in presenting, our materials that we show or share, the output we give, the sharing spaces we have for people to express their opinions, simply what we do or how we manage the space is what is really important and make people get the message fast and accurate, I’ve always been convicted that it’s not about what you say; it’s about how you say it!
It's better to have an introduction round particularly pertaining to what they most like about their work. Asking them pros & cons about the organization. This way you will get to know them more.
For internal presentations within the business I find the following works: 1. Note the themes coming from key stakeholders out of any other meeting discussions ie. A sort of "always-on" to understand what they prioritise. It helps immensely with dry runs & presentation preparation. My CEO for example will always have a question about CPL so I thus always have a section about that or mention it in voice over. 2. Ask previous presenters what the audience is like or if they have any tips. Sharing is caring and most colleagues tend to be helpful with this. I had someone in my team tell me once that an audience member has a tendency to interrupt so I then prepared appropriately to manage him thus landing my key points successfully.
Rather than diving right in and boiling the wrong pot since a presentation is a live event.. I’d ask myself a few key questions first. 1. Why are they attending this presentation? 2. Can I group them by their agenda? 3. How can I qualify which group they belong to? 4. What questions or sampling do I need from them? 5. What would be the best response type would then determine the channel and timing