When I first started giving presentations at work, I thought as long as my slides looked pretty and the content was important, people would give me their undivided attention, right?

Not a freaking chance, I’m not gonna lie and working professionals, back me up here it kinda sucks when you work so hard on a large team presentation, a presentation you know is very useful only to have the audience look at their phones, working on something else, and maybe even turn off their webcam completely.

In this blog, the capstone project help to go to teach you how to cheat, and how to use three interactive online tools to keep your audience’s attention throughout the presentation against their will, let’s get started. Hi friends, my name is Jeff, and welcome back to another episode of Think Outside the Box, where I show you creative ways to stand out at work.

Harry Potter Series

Like the “Harry Potter” series, your presentation should hook the audience’s attention right at the beginning, keep them engaged throughout and leave them wanting more at the end and believe it or not, these three tools will help you get there. I like to start off my presentation strong by polling the attendees with a free online tool called Mentimeter.

As a presenter, this is what I see in the backend. I can create slides with different question types, polls, quizzes, and content, polls and quizzes are obviously for the audience to interact with, and content slides are static information you want to share.

For My First Slide

I have a multiple-choice poll asking them on a scale of Harry Potter how they’re feeling today, and because I’m a very funny guy, this lightens up the mood immediately. You can also change the images, of course, in the Content tab here, or we can just go with a very boring feeling good, feeling bad, and there are advanced options down here as well.

The Second Slide Is A Word Cloud Poll

The second slide is a word cloud poll where participants type in words in response to the question I’ve input here. What words come to mind when you think of digital marketing? I show you what the end result looks like in a little bit.

And the third slide is a quick and easy quiz that allows me to get a sense of how knowledgeable the participants are regarding the topic I’m about to present.

Under the Content tab, I can add up to six options and I can check the correct answer by checking the box here, and the fourth slide leaderboard is automatically generated and it shows the results of the quiz.

Some of you have probably already noticed the instructions up here where you can go to www.menti.com, and input this code to start interacting with these questions.

Pro-Tip

You can also in presentation mode by pressing the Present button here, you can click I, the hotkey I to bring up a QR code for people to scan. If you’re an audience member, simply use your phone or your laptop, go to menti.com, type in the code and start playing.

Free Version Of Mentimeter

All right, I’m not gonna go through the entire thing, you get the gist. The free version of Mentimeter is a bit limited, but I think it’s more than enough for most of us. I always try to include a variation of these three questions at the beginning of my presentations to hook the audience in and lighten the mood.

The second tool is pretty powerful in keeping your audience engaged throughout the presentation and this free tool is called Slido. That’s probably not how it’s pronounced, but it’s what I’m going with.

Half-Day Slido

As a presenter, it’s very easy to get started simply to go to New Slido, from scratch, naming it Big Meeting choosing a start and end date, noting down the event code, and clicking Schedule Slido. And under the Live Polls tab here, you see a bunch of features, but I don’t use any of these, I mainly use Slido for the audience Q&A function here.

You can click Present in a new tab and here you can actually copy-paste the QR code into your presentation and you can even consider adding the QR code onto every single slide so that the audience can scan the QR code and input their question into the Slido queue whenever they want.

Slido.Com

This is what the audience member sees after the scanning QR code or inputting the code into slido.com, they can ask a question anonymously if they want to, they can upvote other people’s questions and they can even withdraw their own questions if it has already been answered by the presenter.

This Q&A workflow has two key benefits, one, a lot of professionals don’t ask questions even if they want to because they’re afraid of looking stupid, the anonymous option takes care of that issue.

Second, as much to give attendees the option to add questions throughout the presentation so they don’t interrupt you and they don’t forget what they wanted to ask.

On the backend, you can actually give a written reply if the question wasn’t addressed in real-time, you can star or highlight a question so that you can filter it for it later, and of course, you can mark it as answered so the next most upvoted question gets pushed to the top.

Average Attention Spans During Presentations

Research has shown that on average attention spans during presentations max out at 10 minutes. So you might want to review Slido Q&A questions every seven to eight minutes and/or take advantage of the polling features here.

These are similar to what Mentimeter has, but I personally just use Slido for the audience Q&A function. Last but not least, we have Kahoot!

Also Read: How to Create a Social Media Strategy That Sells

This tool has been around for quite a while now, and I know they’ve added a bunch of new features, but I personally just use Kahoot! As a quiz at the end of my presentations to test whether the audience has been paying attention.

When you create a new Kahoot! Click the Settings button here to change the title and upload a cover image if you want.

Multiple Choice Quiz, True Or False

There are three question types, a multiple-choice quiz, true or false, or a content, static content slide. You can change the time limit of your question, how points are rewarded and a single select versus multi-select answer option.

After going through all that, you end up with something like this. I have five questions here; I have three multiple-choice quizzes and two true or false.

I recommend going through a practice round with yourself first to make sure there are no mistakes. To start the actual game, click the Start button here, and you will choose, under Player versus Player, Classic mode, and you’ll be brought to this screen.

People Log Into Kahoot

By now you could probably guess how this works, people log into Kahoot!, they go to Kahoot!, scan the QR code, input the game pin, input their name and once everyone has joined, you as a presenter can start the game by clicking Start.

Pro-tip, I always like to prepare a small prize and announce at the beginning of the presentation that we’re gonna have a Kahoot! competition at the end and the top three players get a reward. And no, it’s not bribery of there’s some sort of fair competition involved.

Wait, pro tip number two, in order to get a free account for Kahoot!, you gotta put yourself down as an educator or student when you sign up and even then you only get to have 20 players playing the game with you.