If you are used to Mentimeter
RoomSum works differently from Mentimeter and other audience response systems. It was designed around how organizations and facilitators operate in training, and built to do things other systems cannot. If you know Mentimeter, these are the differences to have in mind.
Questions belong to a class, not a presentation. In Mentimeter you build a presentation, which can include slides that are not questions, and a run keeps the audience's answers until someone resets it by hand. Its PowerPoint add-in asks each facilitator to sign in and map the PowerPoint slides to the Mentimeter slides.
RoomSum is dramatically different, by design. Instead of building a presentation, a developer creates the questions for a class in RoomSum. The developer then builds the presentation in PowerPoint, with everything PowerPoint can do, and uses the RS Start add-in to link the deck to the class. Once linked, the RS Question and RS Extra add-ins, and the DS Check and DS Room add-ins for Checkpoint Live, pick up that link on their own. The developer only supplies the question number, or chooses the action plan or the course evaluation for RS Extra and the round for DS Check. Once complete, the slide decks are sent to facilitators ready to go. Nobody maps slides; facilitators just sign in to their RoomSum account.
Every run is a fresh session. A facilitator using the developer's deck starts a new session from RS Start. Earlier audiences' results can never appear, because there is nothing to remember to reset. Two facilitators can share one session, so swapping laptops mid-training is fully supported. If the same class runs in another location at the same time, a facilitator there starts a session of their own, and each computer's deck keeps to its own room's session. Classes that span several days pause a session at the end of each day and resume it the next.
Different question types. Mentimeter offers many more question types, including quizzes and rating sliders. Some of these are on RoomSum's road map, but the focus today is three things: AI-assisted aggregated polling, where ten phrasings of one idea become one bar with a count; multiple choice, the traditional fixed-answer poll, including the Snapshot, which asks an earlier question again and shows how the room moved; and Q&A. Beyond questions, RoomSum has an Action Planner, which sends each participant away with a dated plan and reminders, and an anonymous course evaluation with an NPS for each session and for the class, offered on every phone from an RS Extra slide in the deck. An organization that also uses DriveState can run Checkpoint Live: spoken role-play rounds from the same deck, before and after the teaching, to see whether a skill moved.
Q&A is a workflow, not a moderation queue. In Mentimeter, moderating a Q&A means approving each question before it appears on screen. In RoomSum, spam is filtered automatically and similar questions are grouped, so your subject experts answer each question once. An answer can go straight to the phone of the person who asked, while the class is still running. Answers you have given before are kept as stock answers and offered again when the same question comes up. After the session, everyone who opted in receives the full set of answers by email.
After the session. Within minutes of a session ending, RoomSum emails a summary of what the room asked to the team members who subscribed to that class's reports. The course evaluation's report follows when its window closes.