What Percentage of an Audience Texts During a Meeting?

In her interesting article quoted in part below, a speaker discovered something amazing about her meeting audience at a Pharma Forum:

“A whopping 89 percent admitted to checking e-mail and 62 percent had been texting. Ouch!”

Although not her premise, mine is that it never makes sense to direct your attendees to their web connected devices. In the audience response business, there is conflict between using purpose made voting devices (not connected to the internet) and Smart Phones that are. The reason for an audience not using their own devices for audience polling, or any other reason, is that they will naturally wander off and check emails, as an amazing 89% of this audience did.

Polling with purpose made devices (not internet connected) makes a lot more sense.

Meetingsnet Article
Dec 1, 2016 by Sue Hatch

Engagement: It’s Not Rocket Science (But it Is Neuroscience)

Jere Thomas is a brave soul. Midway through her presentation at the Pharma Forum, she asked her audience of medical meeting professionals and suppliers to reveal, via audience response technology, what other tasks they’d been tending to during her talk.

A whopping 89 percent admitted to checking e-mail and 62 percent had been texting. Ouch!

But as much as a speaker might not want to hear that her audience was dividing its attention, for Thomas, president of leadership development company Sage Resources, the exercise underlined her basic premise: The need for engagement. And for Thomas, the path to engagement leads directly through the brain.

In her presentation on “Brain Science and Engagement,” at the 12th annual Pharma Forum held at New York City’s Marriott Marquis March 20–23, she discussed the science behind attendee learning and engagement. Specifically, she looked at how interactions are processed through the “primitive brain,” or amygdala, which plays a pivotal role in the “fight or flight” survival response, before they move to the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for forming memories and retaining learning.