This is the fifth of a six-part series.

One of the consistent surprises for me in the keynote speaking world has been the reluctance of speakers to engage in significant audience interaction, despite the real benefits to both audience and speaker in doing so.  Some speakers want to give their canned speech and leave, of course; it saves wear and tear on the speaker.  Speaking can be a grueling profession and minimizes the interaction with audiences is one way to save on the gruel.  Other speakers don’t want to introduce the element of chaos that bringing an audience into a talk will potentially create.  What if they ask a question I can’t answer – or don’t want to answer?  And some speakers want to keep control of timing and agenda and don’t want to relinquish either to an unruly mob.

But those speakers are missing the point.  If you are speaking about a serious topic with the ambition of changing the world – of spreading your message as far and wide as it will go – then allowing the audience to get active in some way will ensure that they buy in to the messages rather than simply hearing it and moving on to the next thing.

So in this fifth part and in one more, I’ll identify ways in which you can think about engaging the audience effectively for their benefit and for the propagation of your message. I’ll phrase the interactivity challenge once again as a question.

How can you involve the audience emotionally in your keynote? This is a deceptively simple question with many answers.  First of all, and most important, you involve your audience emotionally by laying out for them a problem you know they have, and then solving it.  Taking the audience on that journey creates an emotional bond with them and creates trust.  You’re like their doctor who has correctly diagnosed their issue and then pointed the way to healing.  It is the most profound connection a speaker can establish with an audience beyond telling them authentic, vulnerable, revealing stories about some of the most painful and intimate – and relevant to the topic – parts of your life.

Second, you can ask the audience how they feel about a topic before, during, and after your keynote by polling them formally and informally.  Polling software and gamification makes this operation easy and fun for both you and the audience.  Begin your process of discovery in the interviews with the meeting planner team before the speech.  Ask them what the audience’s hopes and dreams are, ask them how they feel about your topic, and ask them what makes them angriest, or most worried, or most delirious with joy.  Then suggest that you research the audience with a poll beforehand.  The meeting team will love that you are customizing the talk for their audience, and you will get good information from the exercise.

Audiences love to hear about themselves, so feeding back the polling data about the audience’s emotional state at the beginning of the speech will begin to create the bond we’re looking for.  And they all will be impressed that you have done your homework to listen to them – to ‘see’ them.

During the speech, you can of course carry out spot polling using one of a variety of polling platforms now readily available.  The meeting planners may have their favorite, or one that they customarily use; ask them.  And you can also do the more casual kinds of polling by asking for a show of hands on how they feel about some aspect of the talk.

Finally, one of the more unusual follow-up polling activities that is rarely performed after the talk is to poll the audience to see how your talk may have changed their minds or enriched their knowledge or solved their problems.  If you can capture this sort of data, it becomes a very powerful argument for hiring you to speak.  At the very least, you’ll get some nice testimonials by putting a comment box at the end of the survey.

Create an emotional connection with the audience and see your audience scores soar.