BACKGROUND

Sarah Decker is the Knowledge Manager for Meeting Professionals International’s (MPI’s) World Education Congress, coordinating the logistics for the conference’s 131 educational sessions. It is Sarah’s responsibility to set-up, manage and assist each of the guest speakers as well as evaluate their sessions to ensure their presentations are appropriate and beneficial for conference attendees.

The World Education Congress is the largest event for MPI’s Global Meetings and Events community with over 30 different countries represented and over 3, 300 attendees. The conference is designed as a high-level educational program and trade show event, providing attendees with advanced knowledge and learning opportunities as well as access to over 500 exhibitors – all specializing in meeting planning and event management products and services.

Originating in 1972, MPI is the meeting industries largest global community with over 23,000 members worldwide. MPI strives to provide its members with innovative learning and knowledge experiences as well as unique networking opportunities.

THE CHALLENGE

In order to help maintain their position as an industry leader, MPI values the importance of audience feedback, especially from the attendees of their largest event, the World Education Congress. In the past, the organization has utilized simple paper-based evaluations that were offered at the end of each educational session. These evaluations help presenters better understand their audience and improve their presentations. Additionally, Knowledge Managers such as Sarah use these evaluations to gather valuable information from session attendees and presenters. This data provides insight when it comes to creating the best learning environment for conference attendees.

The results of these surveys provide MPI with an abundance of useful information. However, their method of collecting such data was clearly dated, time consuming and costly. Having been instructed to research the possibility of streamlining the evaluation process, Sarah immediately contacted Turning Technologies after receiving a referral from a colleague who had a previously positive experience using the TurningPoint audience response system.

THE SOLUTION

Through open discussions with the Turning Technologies team, Sarah was able to communicate her basic needs and realized that TurningPoint offered everything her organization wanted for their session evaluations. With TurningPoint and the credit card sized Radio-Frequency ResponseCards^® distributed at registration, session attendees were able to provide instant feedback regarding the session speaker, the session topic as well as provide demographic information about themselves.

“We used to have actual paper evaluations. Each session had a specific set of questions that we wanted answered,” commented Sarah. “The main reason we chose TurningPoint was because it gave us the opportunity to ‘go green’ with the paperless surveys. Not only that, TurningPoint let us collect and process the data almost instantaneously, rather than the days and weeks it took to scan, process and analyze the paper surveys.”

TurningPoint was able to provide MPI with the seamless and more importantly, paperless solution they were looking for. Sarah explained that recently MPI has begun to take strides in becoming more environmentally aware. They are looking to make all their events more “green” by utilizing less paper, a feature TurningPoint could easily provide. The system also provided Sarah with virtually instantaneous results available in various report formats, making the evaluation process significantly less tedious and time consuming. Overall, TurningPoint provided all the benefits of onsite polling without any of the previous hassles.

After continued discussions regarding the versatility of the TurningPoint software, Sarah recognized the additional benefits TurningPoint could provide their 131 educational session leaders. “Initially, we were absolutely going to use TurningPoint for evaluations. However, after speaking with Turning Technologies and learning more about the product, we realized that this would be a great tool to offer our speakers and presenters as well.” Sarah decided to extend the offer of the TurningPoint technology to each presenter as a means of increasing audience interaction, engagement and comprehension.

During the conference, Turning Technologies offered a fully trained on-site staff to help session leaders prepare for their interactive TurningPoint presentations. Sarah offered the use of the technology to each presenter a few weeks prior to the event. Many chose to download TurningPoint and integrate interactive questions into their presentations. However, several speakers who had initially chosen not to utilize the software, changed their minds after attending an MPI session integrated with TurningPoint and seeing firsthand the power of an audience response system.

Turning Technologies’ staff members were easily able to employ TurningPoint’s “on-the-fly” polling feature to quickly and easily add interactivity to these speaker’s slides. Sarah explained, “We heard a lot of great feedback about the audience response system. Turning’s level of service was absolutely amazing. Anytime any of the speakers had questions, they were right there and ready to go. And I know our speakers were very grateful for all their attentiveness and helpfulness throughout the conference as well as prior to.”

CONCLUSION

Sarah says that the overall perception of the technology was overwhelmingly positive. Both MPI event employees and attendees were impressed by the software’s functionality, its ease of use and the innovative ResponseCard keypads. “The size of the ResponseCards were perfect. They were ideal for our use and purposes. They fit perfectly into the attendee name badges. And the software itself doesn’t just work. It REALLY works!” Sarah exclaimed.

Sarah concluded that, “Overall, we were very pleased with the results of using Turning Technologies’ TurningPoint audience response system. I hope to see a future with Turning Technologies and MPI down the road as we continue to grow and host additional conferences.”

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