How do you maintain the momentum of your engagement in the face of COVID-19?

You were partway through a massive project. Mad March was in full swing, with the financial year about to end.

Maybe you were poised to engage the community on your council’s Long Term Plan, Environment Plan, and a raft of other smaller plans and strategies - all at the same time. 

Or perhaps you’ve spent the first few months of the year planning a big outreach programme for a nationwide government initiative.

But just as you were entering the peak season of public participation - wham, bam, COVID-19 is here.

How to run engaging, interactive group workshops... online

You’re left reeling, and wondering how to shift your in-person meetings online. The new normal will require your online approach to incorporate the best of offline engagement techniques to replicate socially rich meetings, workshops and conferences.

And that’s the subject of this blog post.

This article sets out 6 tips to help you facilitate an engaging, interactive, collaborative workshop… online:

  1. TIP ONE: Accept the limitations; embrace the strengths

  2. TIP TWO: Use Zoom

  3. TIP THREE: Create an unpredictable opening that will predictably work

  4. TIP FOUR: Use a slide deck to enable spontaneity

  5. TIP FIVE: Weave interactive elements through the session

  6. TIP SIX: Be kind on yourself

TIP ONE: Accept the limitations; embrace the strengths

Before you do anything else, let’s talk about your mindset.

You need to start by resetting your mindset about online workshops versus in-person workshops. 

The unfortunate reality is you will lose a lot of what you value about meeting in person when you take that online. Things like:

  • body language (which research suggests usually accounts for 55% of your communication)

  • the shared energy of being in the same room together

  • the magic of random interactions over food or in breaks

  • the changes to your brain and body from being in a different location.

Philip Morgan.jpg
““Mourn these losses and move on”, advises Philip Morgan - a consultant who runs lots of online workshops and trainings. “Feel how it hurts to lose these things and resolve to adapt to a new medium.””

But also, you should realise that online workshops have some strengths over in-person equivalents.

  • Introverts may find it easier to contribute online

  • Online meetings even out the power dynamics because “big” personalities now have the same screen space as everybody else

  • You can reduce the need for post-meeting work because you’re recording notes and actions as you can

  • You don’t need to spend money on a venue, catering or travel. How could you add value in other ways?

Once you accept these limitations and strengths, your challenge is to redesign your workshop experience from the ground up… rather than just taking what you do in-person and trying to squeeze it into an online format.

TIP TWO: Use Zoom, with everybody on a separate device

Why do we recommend Zoom as the video conference software? Mainly because it has several features that many of its competitors lack. Things like breakout rooms, polls, whiteboards and more. Plus it comes at a reasonable price point.

If you need help getting set up on Zoom on learning about its features, here is a helpful guide from the University of Queensland or just check out the extensive Zoom help articles.

And our big tip for effective online workshops is to ask every participant to use a separate device with headphones. This really levels the playing field. The worst virtual workshop experiences occur when most of the participants are in one room, and one or two people are based somewhere else. The in-room participants have a great time; the other participants feel like they’re listening to the radio or a TV show.

TIP THREE: Create an unpredictable opening that will predictably work

How might you separate your workshop from all the other online workshops? 

For a start, you could think carefully about the invitation. What if you sent a personalised card to everybody who registers? If your organisation uses Mailchimp, for instance, you can automatically send personalised postcards to everybody who registers.

Next, you might want to prepare an unpredictable opening for the workshop that will predictably work, suggests Leeane Hughes from First Time Facilitator in her webinar on ‘5 unpredictable ways to start a workshop that predictably work”.

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““Think about what your audience expects at the start of the online workshop… and then do something completely different. No shock. No horror. Do it in a gentle way.””
— Leanne Hughes, host of the First Time Facilitator Podcast

And what do we usually expect?

  • Awkward silences at the start of the online workshop

  • An introduction from the facilitator about themselves and their organisation, followed by a slide with the agenda, then the first content slide… and I’m already looking at my phone or scrolling on another page

  • It starts 5 minutes late

  • Each person introduces themselves with the template “I’m [Insert name here] from [Organisation].” Boring!

What if you turned those on their head?

  • Start with a poll as soon as people enter the workshop

  • Have some music playing in the background to cover the awkward start

  • Warn people beforehand  that you will start on-time, so they should “arrive” early

  • Ask people to describe themselves with 3 words in a pre-workshop survey, and use that as the basis of the introductions at the start

  • Put up some ‘workshop guidelines’ and encourage people to dedicate their attention fully to the workshop.

These tactics can help to ignite some of the spontaneity that can often be missing from online workshops.

TIP FOUR: Use a slide deck to enable spontaneity

One of your key aims of a workshop should always be to harness the spontaneity of your participants. Why bring people together if you are simply going to follow a tightly controlled script? You may as well send them all a document or video to consume instead.

We appreciate that this may make you nervous - especially as local and central government officials are often asked to manage potentially frustrated or outraged communities. But the quickest way to fuel a fire is to add more fuel to the fire… and limiting people’s spontaneity and emotions is a fast route to increased frustration.

One thing we have found is that it takes very different approaches to enable spontaneity online versus offline.

At an in-person event, you need to leave space in your agenda so you can be flexible to the conversation that needs to happen on the day. You need to have fewer instructions and more flexibility.

But it’s different online. In an online workshop, structure will help people to be more spontaneous.

Compare these two situations, for instance:

  • You speak for 5 minutes on a topic, and then at the end ask everybody “Does anybody have any questions?” Without any body language cues, nobody is quite sure who will talk first, and nobody ends up talking.

  • You speak for 5 minutes on a topic, and then at the end invite everybody to write down their questions in a Google doc. You paste these into a Zoom poll. Everybody takes 15 seconds to vote on the questions they want answered, and you answer them.

Structure is your friend on online workshops, and a slide deck can help you communicate that as you facilitate - even when your mic starts cutting out or a participant’s wifi drops out.

You can also use the Slide deck (or a collaborative shared doc) to take notes, meaning you don’t need to write up the action points or decisions at the end.

TIP FIVE: Weave interactive elements through the session

Below we’ve suggested three interactive elements you can use directly wihtin Zoom. But if you’re feeling adventurous or working with a tech-savvy group: try using a collaborative whiteboard tool like MURAL, Google Jamboard or Miro to get really creative during the workshop.

Breakout rooms

This is the feature that we love Zoom for. You can split a large group into up to 50 smaller breakout groups.

And what’s great is you can do this in a few different ways. 

  • Based on pre-prepared groups that you create beforehand. For instance, you might have an event with three different sub-groups, and you want them to meet individually, or you want to create breakout groups that mix up the three sub-groups.

  • Automatically so it’s done randomly

  • Manually during the meeting.

The poll feature

You can easily prepare one or two polls before the workshop to incorporate into your slide deck. If you have a really large group, you might ask people to vote on their organisation type, or their location, or something related to the kaupapa (topic) of the workshop.

Or you could use the poll feature partway through the workshop so people can vote on different ideas.

The whiteboard

Another relatively new feature from Zoom is the incorporated whiteboard. Click here to see how to enable this, it’s very easy,

You can also choose whether your participants can add to the whiteboard or not. Click the “More” button at the very top right and select “Disable participant annotations” if you don’t want people to contribute.

As with the poll feature, you could use this in all sorts of ways. What about a shared drawing at the start of the workshop? Some music in the background could limit the awkwardness. Or what about using the whiteboard to capture feedback as groups shared back from breakout sessions?

Tip SIX: Be kind on yourself

This is perhaps the most important tip of all.

We are all entering a massive social experiment. Never before has the world faced a pandemic like this with the internet at our side. We have the tools and the opportunity to continue our momentum, but it won’t be easy. 

You are probably feeling quite nervous about the thought of hosting workshops online. And that’s normal. All we can say is go easy on yourself as you test these new tools and ways of working.

And remember to seek help when you need it. Whether that’s from your manager, your supervisor, a peer or an independent like us. if you need a facilitator for your next online workshop or want to build your organisation’s capability in online engagement, we’re here to help.

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