Audience Response Becomes Personal

All those great audience response systems we’ve told you about have one drawback: cost. At $80-100 per person, the cost scares off many would-be users. But zuku brings the cost down to just $2 per person (plus $300 set-up) by requiring each attendee to use their own cell phone for texting in their response. Normal carrier charges apply to the individual, so if an attendee does not have unlimited texting in their plan, or is from out of the country, they may chose not to participate. In that case, your event could offer them a reimbursement. But no special hardware or software is required. Just the mobile phones and the internet.

The company is still growing, and most of their event clients seem to be government and education meetings, but I walked thru a little demonstration the other day and it works pretty well. I’m not a texter, so it was a little unwieldy for me, having to type in a special code before each response. But there must be a way to keep that code on your screen and then type a response. A yes or no answer meant typing a 3 or 4 letter code, rather than hitting one button. For regular texters, this is probably cake, and for us tech dinosaurs, at least we leave the conference learning something!

The administrator can send any messages they want back to the responders individually or as a group. So conference planners could sell space on the responses to sponsors. The polling results interface that the audience sees is utilitarian, but zuku is working on a way to drop it into Powerpoint templates for a prettier presentation. Also if you wanted to display responses to the entire group, the only way to screen out responses is to read them one by one and delete the ones you don’t want seen. But I believe this is the way of the future for audience response. Check out www.zukuweb.com.

Thank you to Corbin Ball, meetings tech expert, for introducing me to zuku!