This is a replay of a panel discussion held on May 6, 2020 on lessons learned about facilitating day-long and multi-day retreats and other online meetings where the outcome of the facilitation process is open-ended.
Five veteran consultants share their experiences.
- Maureen White walked participants through a case study of a recent experience facilitating a multi-day retreat for a client that involved 45 participants, two facilitators, three time zones, and one pandemic.
- Janice Frey-Angel and Winthrop Carty compared and contrasted their lessons learned.
- Neha Govil graphically recorded the event.
- Don Tebbe moderated.
Click on the image below to download a copy of the graphic recording.
Below, there’s more about the session, but we have three important questions:
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MORE INFO ABOUT THE SESSION:
Many consultants believe that online platforms are okay for training, but not for facilitated meetings where the outcome is open-ended, such as planning retreats.
Not so. Join a panel of your consulting peers to hear how they are creatively using online platforms to facilitate highly interactive, daylong and multi-day retreats and other planning meetings for clients.
SESSION OBJECTIVES
- Share lessons learned about virtual facilitation of large, day-long, and multi-day online meetings, including those with breakout sessions.
- Explore how to adapt traditional facilitation tools to an online environment and working with online platform capabilities and limitations.
- Inspire the skeptical about incorporating online facilitation into their repertoire to serve their clients pressing needs and keep their practices prospering.
THE PANELISTS
Janice Frey-Angel, JFA & Associates. After more than 25 years of leading small, medium, and large nonprofit organizations, Janice chose to use her experience to serve as an intentional interim executive for organizations going through a leadership transition. Her expertise is in turn-around situations, coming in after long-term leadership and organizations facing financial sustainability challenges.
Maureen White, Maureen White Consulting. Maureen is a consultant, coach, and facilitator based in Boston. Her work is focused on engaging communities to work collaboratively to address social justice issues, particularly racial equity. She helps organizations and individuals to gain clarity about where they are and where they want to go and facilitates the development of strategies to get there.
Neha Govil, ThinkAloud Coaching. Neha is a visual communicator who uses visual coaching and visual conversations to help leaders demystify crossroads and take action. She draws on over a decade of experience working on organizational capability building, performance excellence, and change management and communications in businesses and nonprofits across the globe with two of the world’s largest human capital management advisory firms.
Winthrop Carty, Solving Together. Winthrop helps nonprofits, philanthropies, fellowships, and grant programs co-create strategies for collective impact. He facilitates programs for change-making organizations that help them find new ways of working across silos to co-create systemic solutions to systemic problems. He helps them create networks for impact, nurture, and support emerging leaders, create high-impact, diverse and equitable convenings.
MODERATOR: Don Tebbe splits his time between consulting with nonprofits about the future and helping professionals start and grow thriving consulting and freelance businesses. But communications and instructional technology have been one of his passions – from moderating sessions on AOL and HandsNet in the pre-Internet days to producing and delivering 100s of physical and online workshops over the past 25 years to adapting content for online delivery today.
RESOURCES
Zoom pro tips for presenters (Pivot Method Podcast): http://www.pivotmethod.com/podcast/zoom
Webinar tips from professional speakers (The Webinar Episode, Freenoter Podcast): https://thefreenoter.com/episodes/the-webinar-episode-aka-keynopes-and-freenopes-s1!b8290
Zoom meeting etiquette: 15 tips and best practices for online video conference meetings: https://www.pennlive.com/coronavirus/2020/04/zoom-meeting-etiquette-15-tips-and-best-practices-for-online-video-conference-meetings.html
How to prevent trolls from Zoom bombing your online meeting: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/how-to-prevent-trolls-from-zoom-bombing-your-online-meeting/
How to look good on video calls for Zoom, FaceTime, and Skype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACNGhPKnmok
How to live steam from Zoom to YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaVWdoA38rQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il_Yp12Gtms
Cindy Hugget’s virtual training resources — books, whitepapers, webcasts, and infographics about online training and facilitation from the Association for Training and Development’s online training guru: https://www.cindyhuggett.com/resources/
- How To Use Zoom – Tips for Presenters
- Sample Virtual Session Planner
- Virtual Activity Selection Grid
- Virtual Facilitator-Producer Checklist
Lucid Meetings: 35 Tools for Online Brainstorming and Decision Making in Meetings: https://blog.lucidmeetings.com/blog/25-tools-for-online-brainstorming-and-decision-making-in-meetings
RECOMMENDED BY PARTICIPANTS
These tools were recommended by the participants in the session. The quotes are what the provider says about their tool.
- jamboard.google.com “An interactive business whiteboard.”
- mentimeter.com “Get real-time input from remote teams and online students with live polls, quizzes, word clouds, Q&As, and more.”
- miro.com “Free online collaborative whiteboard platform.”
- mural.co “A digital workspace for visual collaboration.” (Mural offers free workspace for consultants in their “consultants network.” Free to join. More info at https://www.mural.co/consultants)
- otter.ai “Live video meeting notes enable your meeting participants to open a life transcript directly from Zoom, highlight, and add photos to create meeting notes collaboratively.”
- padlet.com “Make beautiful boards, documents, and webpages that are easy to read and fun to contribute to.”
- polleverywhere.com “Ask interactive questions that get participants talking.”