Here’s how to make your online event engaging and intriguing through my handy checklist.
Digital engagement.
Does the mere mention of digital engagement make your toes curl and your innards quake?
Does it make your eyebrows (or more) rise in disbelief because you think great online engagement is not possible?
I’ve got your back. And your brain.
As we continue our deep dive into all that is digital, thanks to Covid (and I do really say thanks as the deep dive has been a gift), lots of folks are seeking to push boundaries and make their online work as engaging as their in person work.
Enter the digital engagement checklist I made for you.
Whether for a webinar, conference, meeting or other online event, the checklist gives you a place to start when seeking to amp up your online engagement.
Start here
- Clear goals; nothing waters down an online event than when participants are left wondering what the point is. Make sure you have a clear goal.
- S.A.K.E.© – make sure you’re spreading out the love and including all of the S.A.K.E.©s, e.g. skills, attitude, knowledge and experience. Find out more here: A simple tool to determine where your bias in learning and teaching lies and how to get around it.
Learning design
- Customized; make your event as original and customized as possible.
- Powerful learning; aim for powerful learning by making a consistent and concentrated effort.
- Story/images; did you know our brains interpret images 600,000 times faster than text?! Storytelling and pictures are both super powerful ways to increase engagement. (Source: Power of visual storytelling (Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio).
- Access and inclusion; engagement crashes when people don’t feel included and able to participate. Consider what could be blocking participation for your participants and remove the blocks.
- See hear, do; make sure you include ways for participants to see (images, charts, graphs), hear (both you and them talking) and do (make it interactive).
- Give and get; make sure you’ve got a two way street for participation. Give opportunities for participants to collaborate.
- F.U.P.A.; I’ve borrowed this from my evaluation work – make sure your event is feasible, useful, practical and the information is accurate
- Innovative; Please for the love of all things engaging exercise your creativity and innovation muscles. ‘Nuf said.
- Many to many; instead of the typical banking method (e.g. where the expert pours their knowledge into so called empty brains) make sure you’re not a sage on the stage but a guide from the side (Allison King quote).
Digital
- Store, find, share; plan for ways for participants to store their learning, be able to find their learning after the event and easily share their learning
- Digital ladder of engagement; think about engagement as a ladder. How can you encourage folks to make their way up the ladder to ever more engagement? (I’ve adapted this from the social media ladder of engagement above which I first learned about from the wonderful Julie Szabo).
- Change personality; by seeking to engage we’re ultimately seeking to change folks’ attitudes, behaviors, awareness, attitudes etc. Be sensitive to what your audience’s change personality is. Find out here: What’s your change personality? Take this 3-question survey to find out
- Tech personality; ditto your audience’s (and yours!) comfort with tech. Find out here: What’s your tech personality? Take this 3 question survey to find out
- Motivation and accountability; engagement can be amped up if we use appropriate motivational methods to increase accountability. Which one of these 6 motivators drives you and why it’s important to know.
Making changes
- Theory of change; be clear about how you’re seeking to effect change by knowing what you’re focusing on; attitude, awareness, behaviour, impact..
- Transfer of learning; make sure you’ve planned for how to ‘get the learning to leave the room.’ Put strategies in place to help your participants use what you’ve so beautifully taught them long after your event has ended.
- Pre and post engagement; find creative ways to engage people before and after your event and you’ll automatically increase engagement during your event.
- Assessment; by assessing your event you’ll help yourself and future participants with even better engagement.
- Metrics; ditto.
Engaging online webinars, events, courses etc. are truly really possible. It just takes some thoughtful planning. Get busy with your next online engagement and use the checklist to amp up your impact. Your future participants will thank you.
Now go on and learn, laugh and lead.
Learn
- Pick which of the checklist items you want to dive into for your next online event.
Laugh
- A chuckle for when things seem juuuuust out of your reach, unlike digital engagement now.
Lead
- Download the checklist and use it to help you plan your next online engagement.
P.S. Check out my Workshops that Work online workshop so you can learn 4 steps to taking that beloved subject matter expertise of yours and start teaching it to others.
Leave a Reply