Working from home isn’t ending anytime soon for the majority of your team, it’s time to start finding a way to adapt, so you decide to plan a remote session. A remote workshop will also save on time and travel- and open up your session to an even larger audience. However, you are now imagining an attendee shuffling between 20 other tabs on their browser and tuning out. Now is the time to start thinking outside of the box to make your session different from all the other webinars, zoom meetings, and Facebook lives they’ve been joining.
Engage your Audience
Your audience wants to participate and learn, not just “tune-in.” Without engagement, they’re sure to “tune-out.” When the workshop starts up, it’s great to have an icebreaker in place. For example, have your audience check-in and introduce themselves. Facilitating an icebreaker can even lead to gathering valuable information on how to better cater to the audience. Perhaps the attendees are all obsessed with internet cats; we can work with that!
Here at Hoylu, we have a few favorites to choose from when it comes to icebreakers. Ask the attendees to gather around a virtual conference table, answer a prompt, or have them start bringing in their favorite cat memes into the workspace.
Make sure the engagement isn’t for naught. Reciprocate—comment on what attendees have brought to the table and make the workshop a personal experience.
Laying it Out
Your workshop shouldn’t be just a lonely slide presentation. It’s great to have an Intro Page, surveys, feedback areas, and Q&A sessions.
Your Intro Page should list topics you will cover, your schedule, additional resources, and the host’s contact information.
Gather feedback from your audience by asking them to throw up sticky notes or vote on a topic by signing off with an emoji.
Best Practices
We’re pretty practiced in this area, we’ve run tons of interactive workshops for our software in our software. So, we have a few pointers for the newbies out there.
Turn off your notifications! Mute your messages and close your extraneous tabs. Go full-screen if you have to. You don’t need any distractions, and neither do your attendees.
Have a Wing-man. People can be pretty shy when it comes to interacting in a workspace. Hardly anyone seems to want to be the first one to dip their toes into the water. While Hoylu’s interface isn’t broadcasting who contributes to what, we still see a bit of hesitation. We recommend having a wing-man on your session whose job is to be “the first sticky note.” You’ll see the interaction flooding in after their lead.
Decide your layout before you start importing everything. A rule of thumb that we live by is to create a horizontal workspace if you’re planning to import any slide presentations as they tile vertically. Working horizontally essentially allows you to organize your workspace by pages and sub-pages below them.
Add links. If you have additional resources or reading that your audience would benefit from, go ahead and include those in your workspace. Add a link to any image in your workspace.
Do it Again!
The beauty of a digital workshop is that it’s all saved to the cloud. All information and engagement are accessible at all times. And, the entire workspace can be duplicated and used again. Maybe, you’ll switch it around this time based on user feedback.
Keep an eye out for some of our webinars for some inspiration! And, of course, we’re always happy to jump on a 1:1 call with you, as well.
Give us a shout at hello@hoylu.com