TurningPoint® Case Study

Eduventures Learning Collaborative

BACKGROUND

Eduventures, the leading research and consulting firm for the education market, hosts annual membership meetings for their Learning Collaboratives, which are research-driven membership groups of senior professionals from colleges and universities from around the country. As the name would imply, Learning Collaborative membership meetings present an opportunity for the groups to share thinking and best practices and set the research agenda for the coming year.

Eduventures' Learning Collaboratives in Continuing and Professional Education hosted their annual membership meeting in Chicago in the spring of 2006. As part of the program, there was a desire to create an engaging presentation that could be delivered over dinner to approximately 90 attendees. Steven Shapiro, Eduventures public relations consultant, along with the team from Eduventures, came up with the idea of developing a collective and agreed-upon "voice" for the continuing and professional education industry during the presentation. This voice or messaging would be the platform that Eduventures' analysts could speak from, as well as those in the industry to use as a reference point.

CHALLENGE

Creating messaging with a few marketing-oriented people is challenging enough, but developing a voice for the industry with 90 heads of continuing and professional education is near impossible. There are so many unanswered questions and individual perspectives on a whole host of issues that prohibit a conclusion to open dialogue among the attendees. In fact, as it turns out, there was even debate on whether the continuing and professional education industry was even an "industry." At the same time, the audience knows their business better than, in this case, the speaker. So, to present the messaging to this audience was not only presumptive, but dangerous.

SOLUTION

Let the group drive the direction of the presentation themselves. Turning Technologies' audience response system allowed Steven, the presenter, to not only engage the audience, but let democracy drive the direction of the presentation and, more importantly, the messaging for the group. After asking questions that qualified the audience and allowed them on aggregate to understand their peers, Steven asked them to draw a picture of the continuing and professional education industry as it exist today as part of the "American Artist" (a la American Idol) competition. Each table drew their illustrations and shared the key characteristics of the industry with the audience.

In real time, those characteristics were captured and voted on for priority ranking using TurningPoint. Next, the participants drew the "industry" as they would like it to be perceived in the future. Again, those characteristics were collected and voted on. This all took place in real time, which was truly demonstrative of the power of the technology.

This was Steven's first experience using TurningPoint, he was thrilled at how easily he became comfortable with the technology. He was knowledgeable about PowerPoint®, so TurningPoint's full integration into the software gave Steven confidence that he would be able to present without fumbling through unfamiliar software. As an add-on to PowerPoint, TurningPoint seamlessly integrates into Microsoft Office products, nearly eliminating the learning curve for users already knowledgeable in PowerPoint, Excel and Word. TurningPoint software installs as a toolbar within PowerPoint. It took no time at all for Steven to learn how to add comments and questions on the fly and make every aspect of the presentation well-tailored to the audience.

Once the characteristics and themes had been solicited from the attendees, each table was asked to write a headline and supporting points to that headline. This was to become the messaging document that all could reference moving forward when discussing their industry—a consistent theme. Once the headline and support points were collected, Steven had the group vote. TurningPoint, once again, yielded indisputable results that could be rolled up into a messaging document.

CONCLUSION

The Eduventures Learning Collaborative dinner was a total success. With TurningPoint at his fingertips, Steven was able to gather the collective input from an audience of 90 senior professionals, all of which were strong-willed, opinionated and passionate. Through a systematic approach to generating ideas and democratically prioritizing those ideas using technology, the group was able to walk away with a consistent message and direction for themselves and their industry. They all felt like contributors to the greater goal and assured that their voice had been "heard." But equally if not more important, the audience had fun. As a presenter, one of Steven's pet peeves is boring, uninspired presentations.

"TurningPoint empowers people to engage their audience, regardless of the presentation subject. Presentations are no longer the sage on the stage, the talking head who drones on about subjects. Using TurningPoint, presentations come to life and can captivate an audience, which in turn, gives the presenter a tremendous amount of confidence when taking their place in front of a room of people," Steven concluded.

For more information about renting a Turning Technologies' audience response system for your next event, contact us at 866-746-3015.