Facilitate Proceedings » Effective webinars

Season’s Greetings – Last Webinar of the year in our Designing Interactive Webinars Series

Editor — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:20:50 +0000

Are your teams connected for productivity or wired for distraction?

This free webinar takes a slightly different twist in the ongoing exploration of how to design highly interactive webinars and virtual meetings that keep people engaged. One of the biggest challenges facilitators and trainers face is the effect of participants multi-tasking on the productivity and creativity of the group. The first reaction is to think about how to STOP participants from multi-tasking so that they will focus on OUR agenda. But in this age of 24/7 information access and communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to design in productive multi-tasking, for example contributing ideas or responding to questions at the same time as we listen to a presentation? We call this Multi-tasking On Task. Register now for Friday December 17, our last webinar of the year.

Select virtual meeting technology to support the group process, not the other way around

Julia Young — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:22:11 +0000

Remember that old piece of advice: Don’t put the cart before the horse? The Number One Challenge that facilitators and trainers have with virtual meetings and webinars is: How to keep participants engaged? I suggest that this is directly related to the Number One Trap that we fall into when moving from face-to-face to virtual events: starting with a piece of technology and then trying to make engagement happen. While technology can accelerate great communication, meeting effectiveness and virtual teamwork, it cannot create it. Rather we need to 1) start with our meeting or learning objectives, 2) understand the different types of interaction we are seeking to create during different parts of our agenda or process and then 3) select technology to support the desired interaction.

In our workshops and webinars about leading virtual teams and getting great results from virtual meetings, we use the following schematic to discuss how to select virtual meeting technology to match the type of interaction we need.

Engagement – Is It the Holy Grail of Virtual Meetings?

Julia Young — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:18:01 +0000

This is an open letter to my colleague Nigel, who participated recently in one of our “Designing Interactive Webinars” events. In the pre-work reflection, Nigel asked:

Is engagement, all the time, the goal? How, as facilitators, and participants, can we be totally comfortable with nil, or minimal engagement? If we had little engagement, then can a webinar still be successful (from the organizer’s and the participant’s point of view)?

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.