Tips and Tools for Small Biz: MeetingSift

As a small business, we are painfully aware that running a small business is hard work.  Between keeping track of customer/client complaints, monitoring and addressing employment/HR issues, maintaining internal productivity and keeping your team on track, it seems as though there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.  Time is clearly important and therefore being efficient in use of time is also important.  Meetings, unless properly structured, moderated and handled in a manner that encourages active attendee participation and engagement, can be an incredibly inefficient use of time.  I think many of us are constantly struggling with how to make meetings more productive.  For this first "Tips and Tools" blog post, we encourage you to check out MeetingSift (www.meetingsift.com) as a means of increasing meeting productivity.

As some background, MeetingSift is a Honolulu-based company that was co-founded by Dr. Alex Bargo and his wife Viil Lid in an effort to address the inherent problems in and around meetings.  "MeetingSift is an easy to use collaborative technology that helps meeting leaders plan and run more productive meetings, with higher participant engagement, better decision-making and more consistent follow up."

We were first introduced to Meetingsift about a year ago at a conference as well as at subsequent workshops and panel-type events.  What we liked about Meetingsift was the way it really promoted audience engagement. Only recently, however, did we have occasion to explore and utilize MeetingSift for our own purposes.  Our recent positive experience and interest in sharing this incredible tool with all of you prompted us to make MeetingSift the subject of this blog post!

In a nutshell, this is how it works:  

• You create an agenda with different activities/questions through the online portal
• Users utilize their smartphones to vote/submit their responses
  
• You use a projector to share the Results Screen (although this is not necessary, individuals can access the shared/results screen online via their computer or tablet)
  
• The meeting leader can share the results of multiple polls on one screen
• The meeting leader can then view and share a report of the results after the meeting

​The following photos show some of the different activities you can do as well as the screen that your audience members will see as results come in.

Immediately after we signed up for a free account, we were contacted by our assigned Customer Success Manager who offered to do a one-on-one virtual demonstration to walk us through MeetingSift.  Through this live demonstration, we learned so much more about the software and its capabilities, including how awesome their customer service is.  

Why we like MeetingSift:  

• It's incredibly versatile - it can be used at very large events such as conferences but it is also highly effective for smaller meetings and workshops.
• Users and therefore responses are anonymous (unless you elect to invite individuals via email) which likely makes users feel more comfortable and perhaps more forthcoming with their responses.
• It promotes audience collaboration, participation and engagement by making it fun.
• It's visually stimulating - different colors, submissions in a brainstorm activity can come through as a cloud, this manner of information dissemination can be incredibly powerful, particularly for those that process things visually.
• The information obtained from the meetings is saved and can be used to conduct subsequent analysis and/or for other internal purposes.

As mentioned, we recently had occasion to use MeetingSift - we utilized it as part of training sessions that we conducted, particularly as a way to solicit responses to various scenarios that the audience was presented with. The feedback we received was very positive and attendees thoroughly enjoyed the interactive component as well as the way they were able to instantly see others responses.  We are excited to continue using MeetingSift and explore further ways that it can benefit our organization and our clients and we encourage our readers to do the same!

For more information, we encourage you to visit their website:  www.meetingsift.com.