Unless you have some outspoken people in your life, you might not know exactly what your audience is thinking when you present. Feedback is always necessary for growth and improvement but getting that feedback can be tricky. A long-standing London company, adHOME Creative, has come up with an irreplaceable solution: Presentii. This presentation tool gathers minute-by-minute feedback from your audience via their personal smart devices during a presentation to figure out the best and worst of what you said and did. An audience can use a sliding scale to convey their immediate interest as you present, as well as add live, time-stamped comments and feedback about specific parts of a presentation. With this new web app, presenters can feel confident making engaging content and understand precisely what is working for them.  

The idea was born out of the education market, first dreamt up as a tool for post-secondary institutions to develop better and more convincing presentations for high school-aged listeners choosing their post-secondary path. adHOME’s Executive Creative Director, Mary-Ellen Willard recalls, “In discussing how we could gather valuable feedback from an audience, it sparked the idea to create an app that would collect direct information about the content presented and the audience’s understanding of what was and wasn’t relevant in that moment.” Mary-Ellen further suggests that Presentii is as a way to reimagine the one-way conversation that presentations typically provide. Without asking audiences for an additional time commitment via repetitive surveys after the presentation, Presentii keeps audiences engaged throughout the presentation. This feedback tool measures the important but frequently missed sentiment of the audience’s feelings and emotion.   

Initially, Presentii focused on a sliding scale of engagement levels, giving the audience a chance to react in real-time to what caught their eye and what felt “meh.” Although this invention was already changing things for presenter feedback, it didn’t yet allow for specific comments and understanding. Knowing whether your audience is engaged at any given time is excellent information, but it’s how you interpret that information that truly makes it worthwhile. Thus, the comment option was introduced, and audiences could now make note of what they liked or disliked while it was right in front of them. This alleviated the need for note-taking and awkward feedback conversation. For example, when an audience member can’t understand a graph or thinks that you take pauses long enough to put them to sleep, they can simply, quickly, and anonymously let you know. Once you know, you can refine your work to be exactly what your audience needs.    

“The most surprising thing about Presentii is its multi-faceted use. We imagined it would be for a specific type of presentation scenario; meeting planners, speakers, etc. but as it evolved, people started thinking about the breadth of how it could be used”, Willard states. As adHOME began to think about Presentii in alignment with the shift in the digital world mid-pandemic, they realized its capacity for versatile use. It became apparent that Presentii could be a valuable tool for much of the online world, including any form of meeting, presentation, sales pitch, interview or live event where you would want to know what people are thinking.   

“We love that Presentii has the ability to help interpret what an audience is thinking and feeling. It helps presenters understand what is and isn’t resonating so they can adapt and revise their content accordingly.” – Mary-Ellen Willard, Executive Creative Director, adHOME Creative.  

Human interactions are based on feelings and thoughts, and without understanding both of those, feedback is only partially complete. Designed as a tool to function quietly in the background, Presentii has come a long way from a needs-based idea to a full-blown accessible tool. Anonymously gathering information about your presentation to work towards one prominent goal: to help you perform better.   

With a goal of sharing the app with a larger audience, Presentii is offering a free trial period for presentation and event hosts to evaluate without committing to their subscription-based program. This way, anyone and everyone can try their hand at this easy-to-use web app for perfecting presentations.