8 ways to use chat to prevent passive passengers
Welcome aboard!
Whilst business travel has been grounded for most organisations over the past few months, passenger numbers for virtual meetings have sky rocketed. But are your virtual meeting, training session and event participants passive?
Whether you are using Zoom, Microsoft Teams or any other virtual platform, there are some creative and engaging ways to make use of the chat function to speed up your meetings, and more importantly, make sure all your participants stay with you until your final destination.
Once everyone is aboard, check everyone online can find and use the chat function on your platform. Then you are ready for takeoff.
Over the next few paragraphs we'll share with you our top chat tips to send your participant engagement levels soaring...
AQA
"Any questions answered" is the easiest way to start using chat in your meeting or virtual event. Inviting participants to ask their questions in the chat not only ensures they don't interrupt the speaker, but that all questions are equal. It isn't just the first or loudest person on the microphone that gets an answer.
Roll up your roundups
Often meetings require certain people to give out updates, information or recaps. Get each person to write theirs in the chat using four bullet points. This makes the following conversations more focused, and you can ask for clarifications and details on the most relevant points.
Take a poll
Some platforms have inbuilt polling functionality, but you can keep your participants engaged by throwing a quick and easy polling question into the chat function. You can scroll through the responses and verbally pick out popular answers to move the conversation or activity forward.
Set the agenda
Often meetings and training sessions need to cover several main points, but the order that these are covered in isn't always set in stone. Put your delegates at the heart of your agenda by asking them to choose, in the chat, which planned agenda topic they'd like to cover next. It also gives you - as a leader, manager or facilitator - an insight into the topics your team are most interested in, or otherwise!
Try an affinity map
When facilitating offline, we often ask participants to write questions or answers onto post-it notes. We then ask them to move them around into groups of common themes. You can do this in the chat! Ask the question, and then once participants have typed their answer in the chat, you can ask them as a group to identify the commonalities and key concepts.
Smart goals & actions
At Walsh's Learning to Achieve, we bang the drum for efficient meetings and training sessions, in real life and online! Your participants should not be leaving sessions without a smart goal. They should have clear actions covering "who, what and when" at the very minimum. Ask them to commit to them in the chat.
Check in with contributions
When someone has finished an update you can ask the rest of the group to put a "1" in the chat if they have a question, a "2" if they'd like to comment and "3" if they are happy to move on. Once again, this keeps the momentum and engagement up and the interruptions and awkward pauses down.
Get valuable feedback
According to research carried out in 2019 by SurveyAnyPlace only 33% of participants fill in a post-event survey. Use the chat to get valuable feedback just before your virtual session finishes. Ask them what they liked, what was the most useful thing and what they'd change.
We specialise in designing and developing virtual events, so if you want to bring your event online, we're here to help.
