The good, the bad, the ugly

How good are your presenting skills? An innovative new platform called Presentii allows you to capture audience interest and feedback in real time

UNLESS YOU HAVE some outspoken people in your life, you might not know exactly what your audience is thinking when you present. Feedback is always necessary for growth and improvement, but getting that feedback, particularly honest feedback, can be tricky.

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A long-standing London advertising and digital services firm, adHOME Creative, has come up with an innovative solution: Presentii. This presentation tool gathers minute-by-minute feedback from your audience via their personal smart devices during a presentation to figure out the best and worst of what you said and did.

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An audience can use a sliding scale to convey their immediate interest as you present, as well as add live, time-stamped comments and feedback about specific parts of a presentation. With this new web app, presenters are given a direct window into what is working for them, and invaluable information to help develop and refine engaging content.

Interestingly, the concept was born out of the education market, first dreamt up as a tool for post-secondary institutions to develop better and more convincing presentations for high school-aged listeners choosing their post-­secondary path.

“In discussing how we could gather valuable feedback from an audience, it sparked the idea to create an app that would collect direct information about the content presented and the audience’s understanding of what was and wasn’t relevant in that moment,” explains Mary-Ellen Willard, adHOME’s executive creative director.

The good, the bad, the ugly Presentii TechAlliance

Willard says Presentii is a way to reimagine the one-way conversation that presentations typically provide. Without asking audiences for an additional time commitment via repetitive surveys after a presentation, Presentii keeps ­audiences engaged throughout the presentation. This ­feedback tool measures the important but frequently missed sentiment of the audience’s feelings and emotion.

Initially, Presentii focused on a sliding scale of engagement levels, giving the audience a chance to react in real time to what caught their imagination and what felt “meh.” Although this development was already changing things for presenter feedback, it didn’t yet allow for specific comments and understanding. Knowing whether your audience is engaged at any given time is excellent information, but it’s how you interpret that information that truly makes it worthwhile.

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To remedy this, a comment ­feature was introduced, allowing audiences to make note of what they liked or disliked while it was right in front of them. For example, when an audience member can’t understand a graph or thinks you take pauses long enough to put them to sleep, they can simply, quickly and anonymously let you know. And once you know, you can refine your work to be exactly what your audience needs.

“The most surprising thing about Presentii is its multi-faceted use,” says Willard. “We imagined it would be for a specific type of presentation scenario — meeting planners, speakers, etc. — but as it evolved, people started thinking about the breadth of how it could be used.”

The good, the bad, the ugly Presentii TechAlliance

As adHOME began to think about Presentii in alignment with the shift to the digital world mid-pandemic, they realized its capacity for versatile use. It became apparent that Presentii could be a valuable tool for the online world, including any form of meeting, presentation, sales pitch, interview or live event where you would want to know what people are thinking.

With a goal of sharing the app with a larger audience, Presentii, which is being made available via a subscription model, is offering a free trial period for ­presentation and event hosts to evaluate without committing to the subscription-based program. This way, anyone and everyone can try their hand at this easy-to-use web app for perfecting presentations.

“We love that Presentii has the ability to help interpret what an audience is thinking and feeling,” sums up Willard. “It helps presenters understand what is and isn’t resonating so they can adapt and revise their content accordingly.” The good, the bad, the ugly Presentii TechAlliance

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