Online meetings pale in comparison to in-person meetings. Attendees often don’t pay attention because it is so easy to flip screens to process email or search the internet. No one ever wants to participate; online is the place for one-way communication, and you can just forget about networking.
Right?
Until recently, I would have said the above statements were reasonably accurate. Online meetings were well, kind of boring. Connections, collaboration, and big ideas occurred in-person. This was unfortunate because even pre-COVID-19, most association members could not get to a conference in any given year. Depending on the association, maybe 10% attend. What happens to the other 90% of members who don’t receive any of our conference goodness?
After years of advertisement-in-disguise-webinars, awkward committee calls, and broken online conference technology, the scene finally started to shift. New platforms and early movers began to experiment with trying to make online meetings truly interactive, participatory, and engaging. Now some teams are not only effectively communicating online, but they are also co-creating and collaborating as well.
But many of us have not seen these innovative participant engagement practices in action, so it is hard to reimagine our in-person events in the new online format as anything different than what we do in-person.
Then BAM! The world changed in the blink of any eye. We, along with our members, joined the millions of other professionals grabbing our laptops and monitors heading for home.
The moment we all realized we needed to physically distance ourselves, associations set to work finding new online platforms and setting up policies for their staff meetings, chapter meetings, events, and conferences. Within a week, nearly everyone started reporting Zoom-Fatigue, which served to confirm that online still isn’t as good as in person, or is it?
Could online meetings offer most of the outcomes an in-person meeting can, plus a few additional benefits? You bet ya!
After meticulous testing, I developed this hands-on session to help your staff, chapter leaders, affiliate leaders, and speakers transition from in-person meetings to engaging and interactive online meetings. Here are the session details:
13 Secrets to Help You Create an Insanely Engaging Virtual Meeting Today
Online meetings don’t have to be awkward or dull. Contrary to popular belief, virtual group meetings can be productive, collaborative, and ridiculously engaging.
The strategy is to reimagine the usual in-person agenda, energize participants differently, and use the tools to cultivate what the internet is best for – co-creation.
Join your colleagues as you spend a fun, fast-paced, forty-five minutes with professional online speaker Amanda Kaiser. Explore how to host virtual meetings for your members that are as engaging as in-person meetings on an interactive platform like Zoom with groups from 13 – 300 participants.