Trying a session with a sample audience

The hardest part of a first session is finding a room to try it on. A sample audience gives you one: ten participants who join instantly, answer every activity you activate in their own words, and leave when you tell them to.

To try a session with a sample audience

1. Open the session and click Go live so the display page is on screen.

2. On the toolbar, click Try with a sample audience. The button becomes a live pill — Sample audience live · 10 answering — and the display's participant count jumps to ten.

3. Activate an activity. Answers start arriving a couple of seconds later, about two seconds apart, the way a real room answers.

4. Move on to the next activity whenever you like — the sample audience follows. For a quiz, it answers each question as you advance and waits while an answer is revealed.

5. When you are done, click Stop, or Stop & clear to also delete every sample answer so the session is clean for real participants.

What the answers look like

• Open questions, word clouds and framework boards (SWOT and the others) are answered in writing, generated from the prompt you wrote — so they fit your session rather than a generic one.

• Polls, NPS, sliders, quizzes and cross-tabs get a realistic spread of votes and scores: a clear favourite, a few dissenters, quiz answers that are mostly but not all correct.

• Sample participants have ordinary first names. Nothing marks them on the display, so a screenshot of a sample run looks like a real one — use Stop & clear before sharing results you present as genuine.

• *A sample audience runs for twenty minutes, and you can start one up to three times an hour per session. It works with the PowerPoint add-in too: start it from the session page, then present from PowerPoint.

• *If answers are arriving but the display looks quiet, check that Show responses (open questions) or Show results (polls) is switched on — the pill tells you when that is the reason.