Gosh, another post about working online — how novel!
It’s been a year of screens, that’s for sure. Like most people I find myself moving from days of looking at the middle-sized screen to the sofa with the big screen, while I scroll through my pocket-sized screen. We’re certainly interacting a lot more with each other in virtual spaces, but I’m confident our closeness is evaporating despite our best intentions.
I have been one of the early adopters of online engagement, having spent the last few years working in a hybrid fashion. It’s meant that I can provide services, do work, and get involved in projects that are physically far away. It’s also meant that we at Day Four Projects, have had to excel at providing engaging collaborative environments across time zones, cultures and topics.
I’m not sure we’ll ever be top of our game, as online engagement continues to morph (and improve) just as we master techniques.
We’ve been involved in a few projects recently all about making online interactions engaging and supporting people in their efforts to quickly become adept at techniques that they didn’t know they needed 12 months ago.
In our experience, there are four areas we can all improve our skills in to make online engagement, well, engaging.
1. Planning
2. Recruiting
3. Evaluating
4. Facilitating
Over the next four posts, we’ll cover some of these topics in a bit of detail and share some things we’ve learnt along the way.
So, a note on Planning
We’ve all been to workshops without agendas, meetings without decisions, and spent time looking at our screens without purpose. The first step in ensuring that never happens again, is the process of planning.
There are (we think) five areas that need attention in the development of a strong, clear and practical plan.
1. The audience
2. The purpose
3. The context
4. The approach
5. The evaluation
The audience
The familiar feeling of ‘that meeting could have been an email’ is the experience we have when our time feels wasted, and we weren’t needed. To avoid being the harbinger of time wasting, begin the planning process by some simple who, what, where, how and why questions.
- Who is the audience?
- What are their needs, interests and preferences?
- Where are they?
- How do they like to engage?
- Why do they engage?
If you know all of those answers, then you can skip the exercises, but we find these three can really help with some of the challenges of audience development:
a) Stakeholder mapping
Useful when:
- Creating a new online experience
- Trying to expand your reach
- Starting a new initiative
b) Needs assessment
Useful when:
- Gaining insights into areas of shared interests
- Prioritising what to focus on
c) Personas
Useful when:
- You have a large group with similarities
- You’re trying to appeal to the majority
The Context
Once you know a bit about your audience, you can plan with context in mind. Be aware of competing priorities, training needs, and availability. It’s not always possible to meet everyone’s needs in one space, but bearing individual contexts in mind will help you plan engagement that is grounded in experience.
The Purpose
We’ve somehow found ourselves transposing physical environments into online spaces, as if the presence of someone on a screen somehow makes us work harder. The opposite is more likely the case.
We’re all fatigued of screen time and going to meetings to contribute and participate meaningfully. If you are going to plan an online session, make sure you have a purpose.
Questions you can ask yourself are:
- What are the needs of my audience?
- What is most time sensitive and/or important?
- Is an online session the best way to address these topics and needs?
- What am I trying to achieve? What is my goal? What do I need from this group?
The approach
A breakout room — tell me more (said no one ever).
That’s not fair. There is definitely a time and place for breakout rooms, small groups, workshopping, problem solving, chat boxes. But you don’t need all of them, all of the time.
Planning your approach is really about thinking through what format and structure will be most appropriate for meeting your objectives.
When thinking about format some good prompt questions are:
- How many people do you have attending?
- Does your audience have a preferred way of working (individually, small groups, large groups)?
- Are you focussed on increasing knowledge, skills, capacities or abilities? Or, are you sharing information, tackling problems as a group, seeking input?
- Does everyone need to give their opinion?
- How much time do you have?
Once you choose the format (meeting, webinar, workshop, training) planning the structure of the session is recommended.
- What will do you do at the beginning? Orientate people, ice-breakers, warm-ups, introductions, rules, expectation setting.
- What will you do in the middle? Is this a workshop where people are going to work, or is it a webinar where they’re coming to listen?
- How will you finish the session? Is a decision required? Who is going to take away actions?
The evaluation
Perhaps, thinking about the evaluation should be the first step in a plan. It’s often the most overlooked and what we find is that people get caught up in tracking activity (how many people showed up and how many people stayed), rather than focussing on whether goals were met.
There are four useful components to start planning for an evaluation of your online session:
a) Key Evaluation Questions
- What is it that you want to know about?
b) Data sources
- Where are you going to get the information from to answer your questions?
c) Data collection methods
- How will you collect the information?
d) Analysis and Reporting
- How will you make sense of what you collect?
- Who needs it and what are they going to do with it?
Thank you for spending some more time looking at a screen, reading about how to make looking at screens engaging.
