How to Speed up ResponsePad Voting

Background

In this article we explore ways in which you can speed up voting performance from the audience, especially in large scale events (500 or more voters). When participants are unsure how to tell if their vote has been counted, they are likely to keep voting rapidly until you ask them to stop. This behaviour actually slows down the voting because it can overload the ResponseLink.

There are two practical strategies for presenters to deal with this situation, and both involve ‘slowing down to speed up’.

We assume that you have an interference-free channel for your ResponsePads and ResponseLink. For more information on interference and how to troubleshoot it, see our article Troubleshooting ResponsePad and ResponseLink Interference

Strategy 1: Vote in tranches

Divide your audience into groups. For example, you can split them into rows based on their seating location. Invite the groups to vote one at a time. Once one group has finished, invite the next group. Repeat until you have all the votes you need.

Why this works

If the ResponseLink receives multiple votes within 20milliseconds of each other, both votes will block each other. The larger your audience, the greater the likelihood of such clashes occurring. By dividing up your group into sub-groups, you are lowering the likelihood of these clashes and therefore increasing the chances of all the votes getting trough to PowerPoint.

Strategy 2: Teach the audience to understand the ResponsePad

When polling is open and the participant votes, their ResponsePad LEDs will flash amber. This indicates that their vote is being transmitted. Their ResponsePad LED will then turn green to indicate the vote has registered, or red to indicated it failed to register. Teach your participants that they should wait for either a green or red light, and that they should only re-vote if they get a red light.

Why this works

If none of the participants know that their vote has been counted, then all of the participants will keep trying to vote until you ask them to stop. As before, the larger the voting group, the greater the chance of clashes. If individual participants know when to stop, your voting group becomes successively smaller, thus lowering the likelihood of these clashes.