TurningPoint^® Case Study

Canyon Snow Consulting Firm

BACKGROUND

Canyon Snow Consulting is a firm that provides expertise in the areas of compliance and ethics, corporate social responsibility and government affairs. Principal Jennifer Shepherd is one of the co-founders that started the company over six years ago. She and her team work with a majority of clients in Silicon Valley, but also reach others in California, Texas and Arizona.

During a meeting of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), Shepherd observed the use of response technology. Even though the meeting took place a few years ago, she kept the idea of response technology in mind and recently went back to the thought when a client hired her group to present a session that “got the audience engaged.” After contacting the SVLG, Shepherd received a recommendation to use Turning Technologies’ response system TurningPoint.

THE CHALLENGE

The compliance and ethics session that Canyon Snow was hired to lead fell on the last day of a week-long event. The session took place after lunch on a Friday afternoon, with many of the international attendees flying out shortly after. Worried that the participants would be less than interested in the material, the chief compliance officer told Shepherd that she wanted the session to be “memorable, engaging and fun,” and “almost like a game show.”

Knowing that the audience of around 50 attendees would be too big to engage in role playing, Shepherd thought about incorporating response technology into the meeting. The session called for the creation of multiple scenarios with a variety of choices, which lent itself to the response system perfectly. The scenarios explored were real ethical dilemmas that posed, “What would you do?” questions. The complex situations called for employees from a variety of different departments in the large organization to consider.

THE SOLUTION

After contacting Turning Technologies, Shepherd also looked into a few local companies since she was working with a short time frame. The other companies insisted on sending a technical person on-site, which increased the total cost substantially. She had all but given up on the idea, when she received a call from Turning Technologies on the Thursday of the event. The cost for the system was much lower than the competitors, and due to its intuitive nature, Turning always provides the option of sending the equipment without a technical person. Within 15 minutes, the quote was approved and the system was sent to shipping to be received the next day before the afternoon session.

In order to prepare for the presentation, Jennifer downloaded the PowerPoint native software on her computer the night before in order to test it out. She received the system at 10:30 a.m. the day of the session and had until 2 p.m. to put together the TurningPoint presentation. Within that time, she updated her scenario slides, learned how to create a participant list and discovered the reporting options.

“The fact that it was integrated with a tool that I already use and was going to use anyway, made it really easy,” said Shepherd. “I was under considerable time pressure, but the user guide was so intuitive and helpful that it made the whole effort possible and successful. I was able to get it all figured out and presented to the client audience in record time.”

CONCLUSION

Over the next three hours, the session ran smoothly. At the end, Shepherd used the reports function to discover which table and which participant generated the most correct answers, awarding prizes to top performers. Participants were not only engaged throughout the process, but enjoyed the competitive nature of the session and took each scenario seriously.

“We managed to overcome a potentially complacent audience and non-memorable session,” said Shepherd. “The time crunch was possibly unique to our situation, and it was so valuable to have a user guide that was so thoughtfully designed. But if you look past that factor, it was also a session that everyone remembered, participated in, and really enjoyed. It started all kinds of conversations around why people voted this way or that way. It was a wonderful tool to get everybody engaged. Most participants had not used the system before and loved it. In the future, we will be suggesting this as a tool for our clients to use.”

For more information about purchasing or renting Turning Technologies' response systems for your organization, contact us at 866-746-3015.