Running an Online Broadcast Meeting

This post shares best practices for running an online broadcast meeting. By broadcast I mean that there are many people in the audience and only a few presenters. Here are some examples:

• Conferences

• All-hands

• Training

• Lectures

I have selected three best practices to cover in this post.

1) Show the speaker! This goes back to principle #1 of human centered online meetings: Make eye contact as much as possible

2) Only use slides when needed

3) Leverage video conferencing features to make the content engaging

Let’s look at the first point, show the speaker.

When you are running something that is mainly visual it is best to share the slides on the main screen. The video of the presenter should also be next to the slides. 

We lose so much context when we can’t see the presenter speak. Have the presenter realize that it's important to show their video, even if they feel shy.

Only use slides when needed.

If there aren’t any slides, then have the speaker look directly at the camera to convey their message. The good news is that on Zoom slides are more visible when projected in a conference room, so you can fit more detailed charts/graphs/tables on a slide and and still have it be legible (I still strongly recommend against this!).

]If the participant needs to read the data in detail, send them an email that they can read before or after the presentation. The slide should be there to boost the message the presenter is giving.

Always email a copy of the slides being presented on the video conferencing screen to your audience. This gives them the chance to review the slides if they need to reference something specific.

Finally, leverage video conferencing features to make the content engaging.

Leverage the chat. Ask questions that would normally be called out in a huge auditorium but now can be put into the chat. Recently. in front of a 250 person online conference, I asked everyone to type into the chat where they were from. I read out as many of the answers as I could as they scrolled by. This allowed engagement even for a large audience and gave me insight into who my audience is. You can also take questions from chat, or even use the Q&A system.

Use Word Cloud generators. I used Poll Everywhere, which gave me a link to share with the participants. The visual was created as they entered their answers to the questions. I’ve used this several times and everyone loved it.

Use Annotation in Zoom.  This is a tool where the audience can mark a slide with answers. For example, you could have a slide that says

New

Intermediate

Advanced

The audience can mark how knowledgeable they feel on the topic you are talking about. Here is a quick video if you aren’t familiar with this crowd pleaser.

These tips for an online broadcast can really spice things up and make your next broadcast much more engaging. My next post will be about how to run a working session online.