Forest City ends its search for audience response system.

Forest City Enterprises, Inc., www.forestcity.net, is a diversified real estate company that acquires, develops, owns and manages commercial and residential real estate properties throughout the United States.

With corporate offices based out of Cleveland, Ohio and regional offices in seven other cities across the country, Forest City Enterprises, Inc. strives to maintain efficient and effective internal communications with its three strategic business groups and more than 4,000 employees.

Doug Bardwell, director of internal communications for Forest City Enterprises, Inc., heads up the often challenging role of employee and departmental communications.

The Internal Communications team handles a variety of corporate projects including the company newsletter, quarterly employee magazine, website content and presentations. The team is also charged with choosing and implementing technology that allows the staff to create and execute communications strategies.

One of Forest City Enterprises, Inc.'s core strengths is that it operates with a consistent focus on its strategic plan. To generate ideas and develop consensus, the company conducts a variety of staff events including an annual Leadership Conference.

During each Leadership Conference, approximately 200 Forest City employees representing each of the company's business units work together to develop, prioritize and establish strategic planning ideas.

For the last three years, Forest City Enterprises, Inc. had rented an audience response system to capture the thoughts and opinions of conference attendees.

Doug explained, "Audience response systems are ideal for gathering this type of data. The conference is not a scenario where you can rely on a show-of-hands for a response."

However, there were drawbacks to their current solution. Their system was not only very expensive, but also extremely complicated, as demonstrated by having to fly in two on-site technicians. The response units were big and bulky, approximately 8 inches long and 3 inches wide. In addition, they had a limited range, working from up to only about 75 feet away. In a large auditorium, where the Leadership Conference took place, the attendees in the back rows could not participate as their response units were out of range.

Doug said, "We wanted to find a do-it-ourselves system rather than continue to work with our current vendor." With a price tag of $10,000 per event, the need for two on-site technicians and bulky equipment, there was a strong argument for investigating new audience response options.

While at InfoComm 2005, a conference dedicated to the audiovisual communications industry, Doug researched several audience response systems to find a replacement for the system used at their Leadership Conference. He was looking for a more cost effective, flexible and easy-to-use solution.

He utilized his time investigating several different vendors, almost all of whom suggested hiring a technician to help Doug learn and operate their audience response systems. Cost effectiveness was not a feature that most of these systems seemed to offer.

After having the opportunity to compare a variety of products, Doug decided that Turning Technologies' TurningPoint 2006 and ResponseCard[R] solution was the right choice for his company's needs.

One of the most attractive features in the Turning Technologies solution was TurningPoint 2006, an add-on to Microsoft[R] PowerPoint[R]. TurningPoint seamlessly integrates into Microsoft Office products, nearly eliminating the learning curve for users already knowledgeable in PowerPoint[R], Excel and Word. TurningPoint software installs as a toolbar within PowerPoint.

Doug was pleased to find that he didn't have to embark on a learning curve, being a proficient PowerPoint user. TurningPoint was basically self-explanatory and simple to plug in to PowerPoint for novices and experts alike. Others factors in Doug's decision were the 200ft range and the credit card size of the response cards.

Following InfoComm, Doug began to assemble a budget for the purpose of purchasing TurningPoint. Coincidentally, he received notification that his entry had been drawn from the nearly 600 attendees at InfoComm to win a 50-seat Radio Frequency (RF) Turning Technologies audience response system.

With the research gathered from InfoComm and the 50-seat audience response system on hand, Doug and Forest City decided to implement TurningPoint and ResponseCards at the next corporate conference, a Continuing Professional Education (CPE) Day for the various Forest City accounting departments.

The in-service training conference hosted 225 participants and included classes to maintain certification and presentations by subject matter experts. To accommodate the size of the conference, Forest City rented additional TurningPoint units to accompany the 50 units previously won by Doug.

Doug downloaded TurningPoint 2006 two weeks before the event and read through most of the user manual to become familiar with the software and prepare for the event. Two days before the conference, Doug called Turning Technologies support team for assistance in finalizing the conference presentations.

Doug also had Turning's technical team help out with last minute changes and utilized the complimentary customer support.

Doug was thrilled as he summarized the results of the event. "We looked like real heroes? The [Turning Technologies'] audience response system was very good for coming to quick decisions, especially for big groups and gaining consensus. Two hundred people could respond within seconds."

What is the distance between
Cleveland and Cincinnati?

1. 248.5 Miles   59%
2. 238.5 Miles   16%
3. 138.5 Miles   13%
4. 338.5 Miles   13%

City's real-life power rangers

Note: Table made from bar graph.