BACKGROUND

Richard Kristof is the co-founder, President and CEO of American Research Institute (ARI) in RTP, North Carolina. In his role as strategic planner and sales and marketing administrator, ARI is active in advancing learning technologies, including next generation corporate university infrastructure and serious gaming for adults. He is a founder and Treasurer of the North Carolina Advanced Learning Technologies Association (NC ALTA), as well as an expert in structuring profitable partnerships and launching new business initiatives.

As a training services company, ARI runs learning meetings as well as corporate universities for some of America’s top corporations. Always interested in ways to better engage adult learners in a high-energy atmosphere, Richard has been seeking technologies to consistently deliver a results-oriented, “edutainment” experience that would keep clients coming back for more.

THE CHALLENGE

At an Elliott Masie conference, Richard found what he was looking for in Turning Technologies’ audience response system, TurningPoint®. Richard says, “When I tried out the technology, I learned how flexible and helpful Turning Technologies’ staff was. They have been unbelievably good at fixing what was needed, finding solutions, or making two pieces of software work together.” As a result of this early indicator of a symbiotic relationship, ARI proceeded to build a thriving business around TurningPoint.

THE SOLUTION

ARI’s PowerMeetings™ learning events are a bit out of the ordinary. They have constructed them using show formats similar to those of Johnny Carson, Oprah, Larry King Live, Jeopardy and Family Feud. A seven-hour event can be a series of these 30- to 60-minute shows where audiences actively participate during the presentations and earn prizes as members of teams.

What are participants learning? Richard says, “Companies will announce new products, new senior executives joining the company, upcoming mergers and acquisitions, financial information, FCC filings and Sarbanes Oxley compliance.” He adds, “These topics tend to be dry, but the unique high-powered media format has Type A people going nuts in the super-charged atmosphere we help to create.”

PowerMeetings™ are serious media productions with a full crew consisting of professional voice talent, a relationship manager, sound/video experts and producers/directors who collaboratively run the TurningPoint slides, keeping all systems up and running, and setting up and breaking down the meetings. Running four to five of these events per month keeps ARI and its crew busy. Around 100 to 650 people attend any given event in a major city; an event runs, on average, two days plus an evening. They can, at any given time, repeat the same meeting as many different times in as many different venues as the client needs.

As for Turning Technologies, ARI builds and delivers e-learning for clients on the TurningPoint platform. Kristof says, “The biggest single benefit is that we depend on TurningPoint slides to navigate the entire event.” He adds, “The technology dictates our focus, as well as pace and depth of content. We are prepared to talk about everything. But the technology helps by allowing us to speed up on topics that aren’t critical, and spend time on those that are necessary. The audience participates along the way through their ResponseCards®.”

CONCLUSION

ARI is deeply involved in gaming platforms and in building serious games and simulations that are enriching and highly sophisticated. They are equally excited about the possibility of delivering the same content live over the Internet using Turning Technologies’ vPad, virtual keypad, and video.

Richard has also been an advocate to move clients who use existing traditional classroom delivery methods toward the use of audience response technologies. He sees this as a business growth opportunity where he can evolve these clients and help them gain from the unique benefits of his pairing of interactive audience response systems and serious gaming.

He is also having ongoing discussions with Turning Technologies about how to incorporate audience response technologies in political candidate stump speeches, turning them into informative events where candidates are learning as much about their constituents as citizens have been learning about candidates over the years. As candidates track statistically viable samples of people they talk to, the data can be gathered and used to shape a candidate’s speech into a teaching opportunity that is intimately tied to the issues considered important by the candidate’s audiences.

It is clear that the Turning Technologies audience response system is an inspiration to Richard and offers the possibility of new applications as ARI’s business grows.

For more information about purchasing Turning Technologies’ audience response systems for your organization, contact us at 866-746-3015.