Facilitate Proceedings » Effective webinars

The Art of Steering a Virtual Session

Julia Young — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:50:36 +0000

Recently I responded to a question from one of my LinkedIn professional groups. Someone asked: “During web conferences involving several locations, I often find myself sending SMS’s to my boss at the same time so as to steer or modify the meeting/discussion on the fly – does anybody else do this? Yes, indeed I do.

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.

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.

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!

Bad Manners in Virtual Meetings – Are You Guilty?

Julia Young — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:27:18 +0000

Twenty minutes into a one hour web conference I found my mind wondering. I was still listening (sure!) but I checked my email. Five minutes later I was working on a spreadsheet. When the facilitator asked the group a question I waited for someone else to answer so I could work out what I had missed. Does this sound like you?
Here are my top ten ground rules. They’re simple but easy to ignore, to the detriment of the meeting. Too often we take shortcuts with virtual meetings that we wouldn’t dare do if we were sitting down with others face-to-face.

More Great Tips (And An Invite) For Running Interactive Webinars

Julia Young — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:01:12 +0000

After my recent posts about boring webinars I was surprised to learn how many people are ok with the expectation that their participants will multi-task. If we were designing an in-person meeting, workshop or training session, would we assume that participants would be working on their email, having side-conversations or searching the Internet? I think not! We would create an agenda that keeps people engaged and challenges them to think creatively, share ideas, ask questions, solve problems, role play, test assumptions, take another point of view …

The level of interest in this topic has prompted me to offer the first in as series of free webinars on this very topic – How to Get Great Results from Virtual Meetings and Webinars. Please click here to register for this event on Wednesday, July 22nd at 8:00 AM PDT (11:00 AM EDT; 4:00 PM BST).

My posts generated a good conversation across various social media about what it takes to make webinars interesting and engaging. Here is an edited compilation of some of the tips and techniques I found most useful.

Why PowerPoint Is Pervasive and Good Facilitation Is Not

Mike McCall — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:00:11 +0000

I believe it was Socrates who said “Even a fool can give a good PowerPoint presentation but it is only a truly wise person who can lead a group of people to think creatively and make decisions effectively and efficiently.” At the risk of being deliberatively provocative, I maintain that this accounts for the prevalence of PowerPoint based meetings.

From childhood, though we may fear standing up in front of people, we are trained to present our ideas. We do it in school with the essays and papers we write, the science projects we – with that little bit of help from our parents – assemble and the tests we take. With that desire in all of us to produce beautiful things, by the time we enter the workforce we’re primed for the task of creating PowerPoint presentations.

How many of us, however, were taught how to bring a group of people together for a purpose, structure a meeting agenda, start with a discussion to draw out the best and most innovative ideas from the group, keep people focused and lead them to efficiently develop and prioritize those ideas, build consensus around the best ones and end with a decision or implementation plan?

5 Surefire Tips For Running An Effective And Engaging Webinar

Julia Young — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:04:52 +0000

In a previous post, I admit that I ranted just a bit about the state of webinars, and how almost all fall short of the engaging and memorable experience we would hope they could be. The core issue is that webinars tend to be big on slides and small on interaction. I have spent a lot of time recently coaching clients on how to transform their training webinars into rich collaborative events. Here are some of the tips I shared…

Design your agenda with a distracted participant in mind.
Assume that participants will be multi-tasking unless you keep them fully engaged with tight content, lively speakers, no more than 10 minutes or three slides of talking before a fully interactive exercise, and more than fifty percent of time spent collecting and responding to ideas, questions, perspectives from participants. Obviously the process will vary if you have 10 or 100 people on the call but don’t give up on the engagement even for large groups.