January 6, 2023 •Array Team
In an industry as inundated with meetings as life sciences, it’s important to constantly work to improve meeting effectiveness and impact. To accomplish this, you need to be able to properly collect information and feedback from your audience to understand how to positively adjust current and future meeting content. Using polling throughout the meeting has proven to be a good way to engage audiences and gather information to be utilized in various ways to improve the effectiveness of your life sciences meetings. To accomplish this, you need to have a deep understanding of which types of polling questions should be used to achieve specific targets. Whether you’re new to using polling or a pro, this blog will provide you with a blueprint to effectively use polling to improve the impact of your meetings to achieve your goals.
How is Audience Polling Used in Life Sciences Meetings?
Polling questions can be used in scientific meetings to:
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Gather feedback, opinions, thoughts, and questions from your HCP audience about the content, presenters, or the meeting as a whole.
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Keep your audience members engaged with the material that is being presented.
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Assess knowledge transfer of the key concepts or training and address any confusion immediately.
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Mitigate compliance risks
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Audience Polling for HCP Feedback
Poll your audience members to gather healthcare professional feedback, opinions, thoughts, and questions about the content, presenters, or the meeting as a whole. By conducting polling at the beginning of the meeting, you will gain immediate insights, benchmark baseline information about your audience members, and inform your presenters as they begin to present their content. Continuing to poll the attendees throughout the meeting keeps them engaged while also enabling your speakers to quickly pivot the conversation based on the feedback they receive. Utilizing polling questions again at the end of the meeting gives you the opportunity to collect feedback from the audience on the meeting and presenters overall as well as specific topics, giving you valuable information that you can use to improve future meetings. Polling at the end of each session and/or meeting also enables you to dynamically create an action plan to follow-up with individual attendees or groups of attendees to introduce new information or reinforce concepts.
Audience Polling for HCP Engagement
Whether your life sciences meeting is virtual, in-person, or hybrid, healthcare professionals and academic scientists face many distractions so it's important to actively plan to keep your audience engaged and attentive. Using polling questions in combination with content engagement technology can help keep your attendees’ attention on the content and off of their own devices. Sprinkling the questions throughout the presentation ensures your audience stays focused on and engaged with what’s happening while also giving you the chance to measure how effective the content is. Oftentimes, it’s easy to get distracted while attending a meeting virtually, so utilizing a technology partner that enables you to push out polling questions to in-person and virtual attendees simultaneously makes sure that everyone has the same experience and encourages those who are not in the room to stay focused. Additionally, in any meeting scenario there’s a concern of the chattiest audience members dominating the conversation while the quieter ones don’t participate at all. You can use polling via your meeting technology to enable everyone to have equal shares in the conversation, without the pressure of having to speak up or unmute. Giving your audience the opportunity to answer real-time polls encourages equal participation from all attendees, whether in-person or virtual.
Want more information on how to run the most impactful and seamless hybrid meeting? Learn more here!
Audience Polling for Knowledge Assessment and Retention
Polling can be leveraged at life sciences meetings to evaluate whether your audience is understanding and retaining the information that is presented. Real-time polling can be inserted before and after specific content is presented to assess whether the audience has learned specific concepts being presented. Case-based polling questions with real-world patient scenarios can be used as a proxy to evaluate application of the information and address any areas of confusion or misinformation before being used on real patients.
Want to learn more about how Array can help you avoid costly trial delays by using polling to address key points of confusion? Read the success story here!
Audience Polling for Pharmaceutical Compliance
When conducting pharmaceutical or medical device meetings, compliance risks are always top of mind. Polling can be used in these scenarios to ensure that your attendees are understanding the content as well as giving you the opportunity to address any misconceptions or questions that come up, specifically as it relates to compliance. In this case study, Array was able to help a client mitigate a speaker training compliance issue by utilizing polling to assess attendee knowledge of certain compliance topics, including real-world scenarios such as off-label use.
Wrap-Up
Polling can be used in a variety of ways to keep your life sciences meetings relevant and impactful since it’s important to continually strive to improve meeting effectiveness. Inserting live audience polling questions throughout meetings gives you the opportunity to gather audience feedback, address confusion and questions that come up, ensure proper knowledge transfer, and mitigate compliance risks.
Want more insights about how you can use polling with Array to improve your medical meetings?
