As everything moves online now, we are seeing more and more workshops turn into webinars. But if your workshop is interactive, how do you keep that level of energy up in a webinar situation? I have been running webinars for a few years now and the majority of my work is online so I thought I would share some of my top tips based off my experiences.
1) Use Zoom (and get the £11.99 a month version) – it is the easiest and smoothest system I have found. You can share slides, have participants videos on, get them talking and/ or typing and continue to ‘read the room’ whilst presenting.
2) Keep numbers low – especially when trying it out in the early days. With people’s videos on you can make eye contact to the screen so they feel that connection with you. You can get them talking and interacting with you and with each other.
3) Read the room. You can usually tell if people are not paying attention, sometimes its the reflection of the screen in their glasses, others its when they look beyond the screen or you see their eyes moving fast reading things which clearly aren’t on your slides. At that point bring them back to the slides, point out something you’re looking at, ask a question, get the focus back on your topic.
4) Mix up open and closed questions and activities. Closed questions can be asked with a simple answer in the chat bot, yes/no questions can be done with a hands up/hands down situation and open questions can be discussed with mics on.
5) Send over handouts ahead of the webinar so they can either print off ahead of the event or have open on the screen/draw their own out. This way you can also get people to do offline activities and then talk them through with the group via their video and mic.
6) Check in frequently. Ask how everyone’s doing. If you need a few minutes break to grab some water, get some fresh air, turn the light on, stretch your legs etc.
Worst case scenario, get your dog to sit in front of you and pretend you’re workshopping to him.
