Audience participation is a crucial piece of the communications process. In time sensitive situations, it’s key to collect audience feedback to make informed decisions. However, many organizations use a notification-only based platform to alert their employees of an important event, which may cost them the lost audience feedback that can be a vital element in real-time decision-making.
Challenges with one-way communication
Notifications are only the first step in communicating. They act like a megaphone – informing your people quickly, but they don’t allow you to hear responses, collect important data, or stay informed on the status of an ongoing event. One-way alerts can also allow inaccurate or unnecessary facts to spread by not allowing the audience to engage with their feedback or questions. Thus, notification-only communications methods offer a good start when it comes to coordinating an audience around an event, but without feedback there’s plenty of missed opportunity.
The role of audience participation
Participation from your audience leads to more available, informative material. Your audience can provide you with updates on an ongoing situation, inform you of a new one, or provide data that is crucial to organizing around an event. Audience engagement can be done in several different ways, including survey responses, inbound messages, social media, and live map tracking of your users. Even less engaged users can provide crucial data through read receipts.
Members of your audience should always be able to signal for help. Whether it’s through app functionality or otherwise, this is an important form of two-way communication to give your users access to.
By prioritizing audience engagement in your organization’s two-way communications plan, you will see the benefits of increased interaction during events.
The benefits of audience interaction
Audience engagement provides administrators with enormous amounts of information at their fingertips. Administrators of interactive two-way systems can control the message, the panic, the situation, and see any event through to an organized resolution while providing peace of mind to their employees.
At AlertMedia, our communications platform allows for a variety of two-way communications. We understand that collecting data through audience feedback is vital in order to resolve an event, and that an engaged audience is an invaluable resource. By investing in a comprehensive communications system, you will be able to communicate more effectively with your people.