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Using Humor to Create Fun Surveys

By on December 2, 2010 in How-To Humor

A survey is only as good as the responses it receives from the responders. One way to increase the number of survey responses is to use humor to make your surveys fun. You can easily do that in one of two ways:

A fun survey

  1. Adding humorous questions among your standard survey questions, or
  2. Asking your standard survey questions in a humorous way.

The benefit to your responders is that they enjoy taking the survey more and the benefit to you is that you get more responses.  These rules apply to just about any survey you could think of: employee surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, training surveys, surveys about surveys–you name it, humor can help.

Ready to make your surveys fun? Here’s how to do it.

Adding Humorous Questions Among Standard Survey Questions

The easier way to add humor to your survey is by adding interesting questions to it, just for the sake of humor. This is as easy as picking a question or eight (such as any from 50 Questions to Get to Someone) and adding them in between your “serious” questions.

The key to doing this effectively is to design it in such a way that it doesn’t cheapen your survey or negatively impact its results. To accomplish this,

  1. Use a 4-1 ratio of 4 serious survey questions for every 1 humorous one. This allows you to have fun survey questions without detracting away from the most important questions.
  2. Where possible, use humorous questions that are related to or inspired by your actual questions. This keeps people from straying too far away from your subject matter. If this isn’t possible, keep the humor questions simple so they don’t require too much thinking (you don’t want to wear out your responders).
  3. The humorous questions should be appropriate and upbeat for your audience. You don’t want your responders to be offended (or in a bad mood) while they’re answering questions about employee satisfaction or your site design.

As for specific survey questions to use, there are countless, just use your imagination. If you’re lacking inspiration, take the Humor That Works Survey for some sample survey questions, or adapt a few humorous questions from 50 Questions to Get to Know Someone.

The added bonus to this method is that it will make the analyzing your survey results that much more fun, because in addition to getting the survey research you wanted, you’ll also learn your responders’ favorite colors or hear a humorous one-liner.

Asking Standard Survey Questions in a Humorous Way

The other option for adding humor to your surveys is through spicing up the serious questions you want answered. This keeps the focus on what you want to know but does it in a way that is more engaging to the responders. To do this,

  1. Include humorous measures along with real ones.  Instead of using a standard scale of 1 to 5 in your training survey, try using a scale that draws on your subject matter (such as a scale of Ha (1) to Hahahahaha (5)).  You still accomplish your goal, but it’s more engaging than the typical approach.
  2. Use humorous examples to demonstrate what you’re looking for.  This is a perfect time for the comedy rule of 3, allowing you to have two real examples and a third humorous one.  You accomplish your goal of giving an example while at the same time injecting humor into your survey.
  3. Provide humorous responses as possible answers.  The last option for any given question can be one that is included for humor, not for a legitimate response.  The key watchout here is that people may choose your humorous answer instead of an actual one, so only do this on survey questions you would be OK not getting a serious response on.

Using Humor to Create Fun Surveys

Adding humor to your surveys can go a long way in improving your response rates and can help you get more engagement from the responders. As the responders realize you’ve sprinkled humor throughout, they’ll start looking forward to the upcoming questions to see your use of humor instead of dreading the questions to come. Do it consistently in each survey and they’ll start looking forward to answering future surveys.

If you want to see a sample survey that uses these tips, and wouldn’t mind helping me better address the humor needs of you as a reader, fill out the Humor That Works Survey.  It’s guaranteed to make you laugh (or at least smile (or at least click the mouse a couple of times)).

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The Secret to Effective Presentations

By on April 21, 2009 in Learn with Humor

effective_presentationsWe’ve all been there.  We’ve all sat down to see a presentation, and within the first 3 slides, we already know that this is going to be another boring meeting that will slowly sap us of any energy, creative ideas, and hope for humanity (ok that last one might be a bit extreme).  We’ve also all been on the other side of the presentation–the one giving it.

The secret to having a presentation that people are engaged in is starting off strong in the first 3 slides. With just a few tweaks, you can kick-off your presentation with energy, engagement, and have the audience’s attention.

Learn by Example

For the purpose of this post, I’ll be using a hypothetical example to show each of the suggestions in action.  For our mythical presentation, let’s say the subject matter is training on a complex tool that is used for tracking expenses, we’ll call it “Expense System”.

Why a technical presentation?  Because some people might be thinking that if it’s a technical training then there’s nothing you can do to “ease the pain”–but those people would be wrong.  By starting off with humor, you get the audience listening from the start, which can help you throughout the “eye-chart” slides that explain the tool.  If you don’t do technical trainings, don’t worry, these tips will work for your presentations as well.

Let’s start with…

Slide #1 – The Title Slide

Many people treat the very first slide as a “throw-away” slide.  It’s your title slide: Name of Presentation, Name of Presenter, Date.  But it’s much more important than that.  By having a compelling title, or subtitle, you can pique the curiosity of the audience and get them eager to learn more.  Which sounds more interesting: “Expense System Training” or “How to File Expenses in Less than 10 Minutes”?  The slides that follow could be exactly the same for the two titles above, but which one are you more interested in listening to?

Slide #2 – The Agenda Slide

The second slide of your presentation should be the agenda.  While an agenda isn’t particularly exciting, it tells the audience what to expect over the course of the next XX minutes you’ll be talking.  You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this slide, but you want to give an overview of each bullet point.  As is true for every slide in your deck, don’t read exactly what you have typed on the slide, and feel free to show some creativity in the individual discussion points.  For example, your agenda might look like:

  • Introduction – What’s this all about?
  • Launching the Application and Beginning Your Journey
  • 7 Clicks to Completed Expenses

You could then say the following, in reference to the agenda topics:

“Over the course of the presentation, we’re going to introduce what the Expense System is and what it’s supposed to do.  We’re then going to share how you can get started with the application, and then provide the details on how to quickly get everything you need into the system.”

Slide #3 – The Metaphor Slide

The third slide of your presentation is where you either hook the audience or lose them, because the third slide is your first “real” slide.  Many presentations get right into the meat of the topic, but this is where a quick detour can greatly improve your presentation.  Humans learn by metaphor, by connecting what they are now being taught with something that they already know.  This is why sharing a creative metaphor for your training (and referencing it throughout) can greatly increase the retention of the training that you give.

But don’t be intimated.  The metaphor you find doesn’t have to be something epic, such as the deep metaphor for life/death in the movie No Country for Old Men.  It’s as simple as connecting it to a single idea.  The easiest way to do this is to find an image, video, or quote, or think of a personal anecdote, that parallels your topic.

For our Expense System example, I might try to find two images that represent the old way to do expenses (a picture of a horse-drawn carriage) and the new way (a shiny new Mustang), drawing parallels between how the old way was slower, required more maintenance, and smelled funny, and how the new way is faster, has more features, and can get you a date on the weekends.  Then throughout the training, as I hit key topics, I can tie them back to the horse / car metaphor.  Now, when the user is trying to remember your training, they can think, “Oh yeah, I can find my summary on this tab because it’s like the dashboard on the Mustang.”

Slides 4, 5, 6…

The rest of your presentation can then become more technical.  But you’ve now captured the attention of the audience and already have them listening and ready to learn.  It helps to also have other examples of humor scattered throughout the presentation, either in the form of additional metaphors, interesting tidbits or asides, but focusing on your first three slides sets the stage for you to deliver a successful presentation.

For more tips on presenting, check out all of our posts on the topic of presentations.

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Warm-up Your Audience by Conducting a Symphony

By on January 29, 2009 in How-To Humor

One of the easiest ways to get an audience engaged and energized at the beginning of a presentation is to conduct a symphony.  Simply put, you use the separate sections of the audience saying different syllables that, when combined, sound out the title of your presentation.

Here’s what you do:

Step 1: Tell the Audience What’s Up

Let the audience know the importance of staying engaged and getting involved.  Tell them you will be helping to warm them up by making them part of the presentation.

Step 2: Break Up Your Topic Into Syllables

Take your macro level topic (or the title of your presentation if it’s short), and divide it into it’s syllables.  For example, if you were training on an Adobe project, you would have the syllables “Ah”, “doh”, and “be”.

Step 3: Split the Audience in Syllables

Take the number of syllables you have, and divide your audience by that many–in our example, we would divide the audience into three sections.  You don’t have to move people, just do it in natural groupings based on where they are sitting.

Step 4: Assign the Syllables

Assign each of the divided sections a different syllable.  To not completely reveal what you are doing, try assigning the syllables in a different order than they are pronounced.  So you might say, “Group 1, when I point to you, you say ‘Be’.  Group 2, you say ‘Doh’.  Group 3, you say ‘Ah’.”

Step 5: Conduct the Audience

Now start conducting the audience by pointing to each of the different sections.  Start out by picking random orders of the syllables–”Ah” “Be” “Doh”, “Be” “Doh” “Ah”, “Doh” “Ah” “Be”.  And then as you are ready to wrap up the warm up, have them correctly shout out the topic name in the correct order a couple of times–”Ah Doh Be”, “Ah Doh Be”.

Final Thoughts

Sure this warm-up may be a little cheesy, but it gets the entire audience engaged in what you are doing and they are now behaving like one cohesive unit.  For some extra fun, you can always end your presentation coming back to this exercise.

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