From advisory boards and speaker training to investigator meetings, life science meetings all fundamentally center on important information that can improve patients’ lives. When the flow of information goes both ways, however, meeting organizers can prove their content was understood while gaining valuable information from the HCPs and key opinion leaders in the room.
To increase attendee input while keeping control of the meeting in the moderator’s hands, Array’s Q&A feature enables every participant to ask questions any time via the platform. Only the moderator sees the questions, screening them in real-time to use as assets in their management of the topic and flow. Simultaneously, all questions, times, slides and who asked them are saved to be collated with other meeting metrics for actionable insights after the meeting.
As questions are screened, the moderator has several options for how to use them:
- Use a question immediately as part of the meeting, forwarding it on to the speaker or speakers. The moderator also can develop an aggregate of several related questions to put the focus where it needs to be. For example, looking at similar questions, the moderator can determine if there is significant interest or confusion, and then redirect the speaker to address that.
- Respond directly to whomever asked the question. Not all questions can or should be answered by the speaker, but leaving questions unaddressed discourages participants from asking more. In fact, we have seen a 46% increase in questions asked by the audience when Direct Reply Mode is utilized. Even something as simple as saying you’ll have to reach out to them via email later with an answer demonstrates your appreciation of attendees’ time and input.
- Address questions in follow-up. Since questions are saved along with information about who asked them, there are many opportunities to use the questions for follow-up. While you can simply email responses later, you can also review the questions that seemed to be most popular and use those to send a meeting FAQ or other summary communication out to all attendees.
Don’t miss the opportunity to gather the types of insights that can only come from questions when you feel you’ll be pressed for time. Array’s pre-meeting survey can be used to collect questions in advance to avoid missing them at the end of the meeting and allow attendees to focus on the speaker. These are also valuable to review during content creation and slide reviews. Additionally, when a meeting is running late, rather than shortening or cutting the Q&A time at the end, prompt attendees a few minutes early to submit their questions to the platform and tell them you’ll follow up with each after the meeting, if not during. By using one or both tools, you will win points with attendees for making good use of their time and communicating important information, and also have data from the questions to use strategically after the meeting.
