Whether you own an Audience Response System, or have hired an Audience Response Rental Company, the ultimate reason for using the audience voting system is to analyze the data sent from audience keypads which is of course displayed as a variety of results graphs.

Understanding these graphs is essential to presenters, as well as to those who are ultimately responsible for data analysis.  This is especially true when the data gathered from the audience will result in specific business decisions, or initiatives.

So let's get started by assuming that you have recently held an interactive meeting for which you hired an Audience Response rental company.   In all likelihood, the company has provided you with one or more reports.

Most often the first report in the set shows how the total group (audience) responded to each and every question.  Any additional reports typically show how specific demographic groups responded to each question.  

It is probably worth mentioning that the data gathered is of course, only as good as the questions themselves.  Long, complex, or unclear questions will result in data that is just not very reliable.   When crafting questions, it is strongly recommended that you keep them brief and to the point.  If you are asking for opinions, it best to use 'active' phrases and to include a specific time reference.

A poorly authored question might read "Although you may or may not always agree with him, how would you rate the President of the United States?"    An improved version is "How do you rate the U.S. President's overall job performance, during the past six months?"   For more information on how best to craft questions, please see our Authoring Audience Response questions page.

When analyzing graphs, it is helpful to know that there are four basic patterns that you might encounter.  They are: the Bell Curve, Skewed Distribution, Bimodal Distribution, and Rectangular Distribution.  A discussion of each follows.

Understanding Bell Curves ->