Introducing Flashcast: The first predictive live audience experience

Published Jun 25, 2019 by Vanessa Pineda

The way that we give presentations and interact with audiences in a live setting hasn’t changed in ages, though research shows audiences mentally check out after about 10 minutes. Our short attention span likely has to do with how easy it’s become to fulfill any passing desire, need, or curiosity with a text, search, swipe, or one-click purchase. It’s time presenters stop doing all the talking and mobilize the crowd.

Public speaking experts will usually emphasize that to capture people’s attention, you have to create a story with your content. 55% of people agree that a story keeps them engaged. But beyond that, speakers need to make everyone in the audience feel like they’re part of the story in a meaningful way.

Currently, speakers attempt this by building in basic live polling or voting, using tools like PollEverywhere into their presentations. While popularity votes can be interesting, we think there is an opportunity for a far deeper level of engagement with live audiences: a simple, yet powerful interaction to capture the perspective and confidence level of a live audience we can quantify and aggregate in real-time.

The instant fix

We built Flashcast to fill this need for a richer, more dynamic learning experience. It allows the speaker to capture live audience predictions in the form of a probability, much like a weather forecast (e.g., “there’s an X% chance something will happen”). Individual predictions are instantly aggregated into a consensus prediction you can livestream to the room. 

Suddenly, your presentation becomes a shared story and learning experience that also satisfies the audience’s desire for instant gratification.

Smarter interaction

Let’s say you’re giving a talk about the ‘future of work’ at a management conference filled with industry professionals. Flashcast lets you leverage that expertise in the room by collecting predictions on hot-button trends that will spark conversation they’ll remember. (See image below.)

Or, you’re a Product Leader that meets regularly with a large team. Flashcast lets the team predict timing of milestones at the beginning of a meeting so you can uncover more actionable takeaways.

Or, if you’re an educator, there’s no better way to hone your student’s critical judgment skills. Use Flashcast to have students express their opinion around a topic in a constructive and quantifiable way that gets their wheels turning.

The X factor

With Flashcast, presenters set up a question before the event through flashcast.io and project it during the presentation (you’ll need WiFi in the room). The audience can access the question on their phone using a short code, submit their probabilistic predictions, see their answers compared to the consensus prediction, and engage in more meaningful conversation.

Flashcast is built by Cultivate Labs, a company that designs enterprise crowdsourcing solutions. While easy for its participants to engage with, Flashcast has been engineered with the same technology and methodologies proven through years of work with organizations like the U.S. Intelligence Community, Deutsche Bank, AbbVie, LG, and Shell.

Arriving summer 2019

Flashcast will be available later this summer in beta version. It’s free for single use, and monthly subscriptions will become available with more features. 

If you’re ready to use Flashcast for your next presentation, sign up for our community of beta testers. We would also really appreciate your support by following us @Flashcastapp on Twitter or Facebook! 

Conferences live prediction polling Classrooms and Lectures Company Meetings