How do we create a webinar that’s engaging and interactive? The following ideas and webinar best practices were all submitted by professionals who organize online events, virtual conferences, and webinars and who attended my recent online workshop, Creating Dynamic, Engaging Online Conferences & Webinars. This list of engagement strategies is meant to help event planners, moderators and speakers make webinars more interactive. It’s a combination of online presentation formats and strategies to use when thinking about how to create a webinar presentation. Or to use when planning an online conference session. Each of these engaging webinar best practices is listed along with some of my own additional commentary about how to make for more interactive webinars.
Breakouts lead to engaging webinars and more interactive conference sessions
As a webinar best practice, I fully agree with the importance of breakouts to increase engagement in meetings, both online and offline. First, you need to have an outstanding, compelling speaker if you want to keep your attendees engaged for more than 15 or 20 minutes. Most speakers at conferences or presentations are not professional entertainers or speakers and just don’t usually have the capacity to carry a presentation for 45 minutes.
It’s much easier to put people into groups and have them discuss or share. Getting people to participate keeps them from drifting off into other work like email or texting, and really values the people in the room as well as their expertise. We could write an entire book on how and where breakouts could or should be used in conference sessions or interactive webinars. The bottom line is that the typical model of someone doing 30 to 60 minutes with a slideshow presentation will not usually beat people getting to talk and meet with each other on a topic that they care about.
Less intro but more content
For sure. I’m often mystified by the amount of introductions that people will do even in a 30-minute presentation where the introduction may be 10 minutes and three or four of those minutes may be reading almost the entirety of someone’s CV or the resumes of all five panelists. In most cases, all of the attendees already know who’s speaking; that’s the reason why they’re there in the first place. This isn’t to say that you should skip all of your introductions to make for a more interactive webinar.
One thing that we all see a lot of today is skipping any sort of explanation of the technology platform that we’re using to have the meeting; then 10 or 20 minutes in we realize that people don’t know how to mute and unmute themselves and we still have to spend that time and it really takes the energy out of the session. But as the old maxim goes: “Start where the action is!” For me, I try to get to small breakout groups pretty quickly to get people invested and engaged in the session and to feel like they’re connected to other people there. It’s not uncommon for me to introduce myself 10 minutes into the session. It’s a little unconventional but that pays off when it comes to front-loading good energy and webinar engagement.
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