Facilitate Proceedings » Virtual Meetings

July Webinars – How to keep participants fully engaged

Julia Young — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:50:17 +0000

With our Interactive Webinars series, we’ve been exploring the concept of building highly interactive elements into virtual meetings and webinars. We invite anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas with us to engage in an interactive experience of creative thinking about ways to design collaborative activities in what is too often a one on many, presentation heavy format. Our series continues this month with more opportunities to collaborate on ideas about designing interactive webinars and virtual meetings. We’ve got two great webinars planned for July.

Public Webinars – Leading Virtual Teams

Julia Young — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:29:43 +0000

Our colleague, Nancy Settle-Murphy at Guided Insights is offering a rare set of public sessions this month for her two most popular virtual classroom offerings: Leading Virtual Teams on June 29 and Planning and Running Exceptional Virtual Meetings on June 30. Designed with busy people in mind, each of these virtual sessions delivers a wealth of vital information, skills and tools within a compressed period of time. In fact, participants receive about five hours’ worth of content by participating in a two-hour virtual session. Registration is strictly limited to 15 people for each session. Please click on the links above for more information or to register, or contact us directly for more information.

Paying Attention to the Virtual Meeting Place

Julia Young — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:12:29 +0000

As virtual meeting facilitators we don’t control the meeting space in same way as we do for face-to-face meetings but there is value in paying attention to the physical surroundings – props, physical space and prompts – of our participants in order to optimize participation, attention and stimulation.

Every Productive Virtual Meeting Needs A Communication Plan

Danuta McCall — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:20:23 +0000

In my last post, I made the case that facilitators should take a new look at how to make pre-work more valuable and compelling. There are great benefits to be gained from designing engaging pre-work activities (and incentives to complete them) before your virtual or face-to-face event. They range from raising the level of investment and preparedness of the participants to enabling the facilitator to set the tone for the meeting ahead of time.
There are two reasons why thinking out a communication plan for the meeting, and particularly the pre-work, is very helpful. First, it is a way to communicate the value, urgency, incentives and consequences of doing the pre-work. Second (and this is particularly true for those facilitating virtual events), time spent in advance connecting and building personal connections is enormously valuable in creating a trustworthy and enlivened environment for true sharing and interaction. In other words, a bit of advance phone and email work will pay huge dividends.
When constructing your communications plan, be sure consider the following.

Interaction: The Key To Successful Webinars

Julia Young — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:38:42 +0000

Designing Interactive Webinars & Virtual Meetings
How to Keep People Engaged

We received such enthusiastic feedback for our fall 2009 series that we are offering a new series of complimentary webinars where you, the participants, help build the agenda. Please join us Wednesday, February 10th or Thursday February 18th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Are you spending too much time in ineffective virtual meetings and boring webinars?The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars and virtual meetings is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.

6 Ways to Make Pre-Work Compelling

Danuta McCall — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:15:40 +0000

Most facilitators and team leaders I’ve talked to see the value of assigning some sort of pre-work before a virtual meeting and bemoan the fact that only a small fraction of the participants take this request seriously and complete their assignments. It’s time to take a new look at how to make meeting pre-work more valuable and more compelling.

There are two important reasons to design pre-work into your webinar, online conference or workshop. The first is to get your participants ready to take full advantage of the session by thinking ahead about the content, beginning to formulate ideas or getting to know the group. Participants who have completed well thought out pre-work are “primed” for active and open participation in the real-time event.

The second is to get you ready to facilitate the session effectively. By knowing more about your participants and their interests, you are in a position to develop focused questions that will stimulate ideas. In a virtual setting this becomes even more critical, as you typically have less time in which to achieve your meeting objectives and lack the visual cues that make it easier to adjust your course in mid-stream.

Where Rubber Meets Road (2): Six Traps to Avoid When Designing Your First Virtual Workshop

Julia Young — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:15:24 +0000

Where Rubber Meets Road is my way of bringing some of the practical experiences I’ve observed with clients to bear on the theory of transitioning our successful face to face events to the virtual world. My last post talked about one client’s experience converting their two day workshop to a virtual event. Here are some of the traps they almost fell into along the way.

Trap #1: Starting with the technology.
Thinking about what technology tools support our virtual workshop should be the last step in our planning. Coming from a F2F workshop environment, we are likely not familiar with online technology, so considering this at the start of the planning process will only limit our thinking. Start with what we know – good group process. Pick the technology to match the requirements of the group, the process and the learning objectives.

Where Rubber Meets Road: Real Experiences Transitioning To Virtual Workshops

Julia Young — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:52:10 +0000

I recently spent some time with some wonderful members of the Global Facilitator Services Corps (www.GFSC.org). The purpose of this particular conversation was to begin to explore how GFSC might build a virtual version of their very successful one or two day face-to-face workshop.

In the beginning the group felt out of their comfort zone. A previous web conference had been disappointing. Facilitating a workshop filled with attentive faces and sitting alone looking at a computer screen seemed like two different worlds. Technology was the solution but it also seemed to get in the way.

To explore the possibilities, we decided to follow the eight principles from my firm’s recent white paper, Designing Interactive Webinars.

Additional Webinar Date: Designing Interactive Webinars

Danuta McCall — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:06:19 +0000

We were oversubscribed within 24 hours of posting our invitation to sign up for our free one hour webinar that demonstrates eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engagingYOU as participants!

Based on this response, we’ve added a second webinar! The additional date is Tuesday, November 10th at 8:00 AM PDT (11:00 AM EDT, GMT 4:00 PM) .

Below we’ve repeated the information about the webinar. We hope to see you there!

Join us for an Interactive Webinar Experience!

Danuta McCall — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:22:20 +0000

Designing Interactive Webinars – How to Keep People Engaged

Please join us Thursday November 5th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Be honest: How many of the webinars that you attend (or deliver) are boring? The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.