The comparisons between audience response keypad polling and mobile device polling are not well documented.

Each technology has its pros and cons, that’s another discussion for the purposes of this article I’ll cover the differences. The platforms differ in speed, accuracy, reliability, security, and cost.

My advice, it’s important to know your objectives for the meeting before deciding on a platform, it may even be best to have both available simultaneously. There are many possible objectives regarding audience response you could consider, to keep the article short I’ll just list a few;

What percentage of the audiences responses do I need/want to collect. Is it important to have the majority of audience members participate?

What do you want to do with the response data collected? Do you want to publish it, use it for research, or just have fun?

Do you wish to collect demographic data from your audience?

Secondly, its equally important when selecting your platform to consider your audience, who is attending your event and what they would prefer. The number of responses you receive to the questions you ask will be directly influenced by how easy it is to submit a vote, the complexity of the question asked, and how interested the audience members are in the subject.

What we have learnt in our experience is that for most audiences it’s about the convenience; that is how easy it is to submit their vote.

Many Mobile Applications or sms voting systems will require several steps to submit a single response, while audience response keypads generally only require a single step.

If you would like to know more contact us, we would be happy to share our experience with you.

Another article you may enjoy reading from Peter Babel from Meridia Interactive Solutions in Pylmouth, USA who had a client who tested out using mobile device polling and only received a 10% response rate, after that event they went back to using audience response keypad for polling.