There are a number of different mainstream audience response system applications.  They typically include: general opinion polling for presentation support, employee surveys, customer surveys, training, market research, learning, and parliamentary type audience voting.

Discuss each of these with the team.  List the three most important applications to your organization.  Do not take on more than three.  Once you've purchased a system and have experience with it, then you can roll it into other areas of the company. 

You should then define the 'average' number of people in each of your top three meeting types, and the likelihood of simultaneous usage.  The goal is to decide whether one large system, versus two or three smaller systems is best.

Know that in most cases, a single presenter can connect 2 or 3 small systems to a single computer in order to service a larger audience.  Most radio based hardware platforms can be assigned a specific channel when placing your purchase order.  Ideally, if you are purchasing multiple systems, you would want to have a different channel assigned to each system that you order.

Each system will connect to a USB port on a notebook computer, or desktop computer.  Using multiple systems is usually only a matter of having enough ports.  Once connected, the polling software collects data from each individual system and displays results as a single graph.

You should also know that most radio based systems allow you to change the  keypad channel quite easily.  So, if you need just a few extra keypads for your  system temporarily, you could borrow them from another system.  Just be sure you change them back to the original channel before returning them.  Otherwise, your coworker is not going to be too happy with you.

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