by Nikki Rohde, CIG, CIGT, CHI
The Welcome...
Hey interpreters! What time does your program start?
Actually it’s 10 minutes sooner.
Within a few minutes of your program’s advertised start time, many of your visitors have already arrived and are ready to participate. They might want to know if they are on the list or if they are wearing the right gear for the adventure or where the bathrooms are. Those few minutes before the program formally begins gives you time to address their concerns by way of making that small talk that is so imperative to your visitor feeling welcomed.
“Ugh, I hate small talk.” I hear you, but hear me out. The best small talk gets them talking, not you! But it’s your job to spark it. Here’s two of the easiest small talk sparkers…
Where are you visiting from?
What are you hoping to see today?
These are open-ended questions that draw from the visitor’s life experience. Though the answers may not have anything to do with the content of your program, welcome your visitors to begin participating right away. If they feel welcome and encouraged to participate from the start, they are more likely to continue to participate. If you plan to prompt your visitors to participate during your program, reflect on the content, and especially if your purpose is to encourage them to eventually care, a simple open-ended question that anyone can answer not only welcomes them but let’s them know you welcome their continued participation.
Join us for the next installment in this series when we learn the value in saying yes to wrong answers!
Saying Yes to What they Don’t Know...
If you want to know how much your visitor knows about your topic, you can simply ask them.
Well… yes and no.
Here’s the “no” in knowing your audience—interpretation is not formal education. Most of our visitors choose to come to your location. They are choosing to spend their hard-earned money and free time to visit. They are happy to learn something, but they are not there for a test.
So yes, ask questions but make the questions open-ended instead of looking for one right answer. Can the audience be messy with their thinking? Is it ok to misremember what they forgot or didn’t pay attention to in school? Can they “take a stab at it”? Can they admit that they don’t know? Can they be wrong without being chastised?
In the last episode in this series, we talked about asking open-ended questions as a way to welcome visitors to your program and as a way to encourage them to feel confident to continue to participate. If you’ve done that, they are more likely to share their thinking later, even if it could be wrong.
Asking questions that have many right answers will have you replying “Yes!”
Join us for the next installment in this series where we will dig into why your audience isn’t answering your questions.
Have Trust Issues?...
You’ve given them all the wow facts in a logical order that proves how meaningful the topic is. Your program time is almost done and you want to know if you were successful in reaching your objective of getting the visitor to care. You ask the audience to tell you how important it is to them and…
…and instead, there’s crickets.
In this case, silence is not golden.
Either they are not trusting you to accept their thinking, or you have not trusted them to build their own thinking.
Scroll back up to The Welcome… and try again. With practice your open-ended questions will be producing golden opportunities!
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