Meetings and workshops are a significant part of work for most of us. Whether they end up being useful or a waste of time depends a lot on how they are designed.

A diversity of activities and balanced mix of interactions are essential for any facilitated group session, be it a strategic workshop, a team retreat, a kick-off meeting, a co-creation session or a regular project meeting.

It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your workshop, the ones that will fit perfectly with your objectives, group size, profile of participants, and available time.

You may already have some favourite exercises for different types of workshops, but as you facilitate more and more meetings, you might not want to use the same activities over and over again.

So what are the best ways to equip yourself with new facilitation methods? You might ask some experienced colleagues to share their tips and tricks or read a thorough and insightful book on workshop facilitation. Or if you don’t have the opportunity for either of these options, you might just hit the web.

There is a myriad of resources online that can help you pick the right tool or technique for a specific meeting. Some are hard to navigate and only offer generic tools, while others offer you precisely described workshop activities with practical facilitator tips in an easy-to-navigate web environment.

Listed below are our favorite and trusted resources. In the first section of the article you will find platforms that not only offer great quality facilitation methods and workshop activities but also help you find what you are looking for by allowing you to apply different filter criteria on a user friendly interface:

1) Hyper Island Toolbox

Hyper Island is a creative business school which also offers consulting services. It approaches learning by focusing on collaboration, creativity, and learning-by-doing. Hyper Island Toolbox offers a selection of activities to help you do things more creatively and collaboratively in a team or organisation. It features both some popular, well-known workshop activities and methods created by Hyper Island itself.

The HI toolbox hosts more than 70 activities on an extremely user-friendly interface that allows browsing by category, time frame and group size. All methods are illustrated with consistent and relevant visuals, making it easy and visually pleasant to browse.

2) WorkshopBank

WorkshopBank is an online community that provides information, techniques and resources for trainers and businesses that need help with things like team building. Although a paid subscription offers access to full workshop templates and unbranded content, you can find more than 40 free tools and activities on their site to help create high-impact meetings, events and workshops.

The free activities are described in great detail to capture the essence of any exercise, and you can find downloadable Powerpoint templates for each activity to help you run it in a meeting.

3) SessionLab Library

SessionLab is an online platform providing a workshop planner application and a public library of facilitation methods, developed by the makers of this blog. The library hosts more than 400 facilitation methods, both coming from organisations sharing their own content (including some like Hyper Island and Gamestorming that are also featured in this list) and individual meeting practitioners sharing their favourite tools with the community.

A unique feature of this library is that it allows you to easily save and use its activities. If you find an activity you like, you can save it for later in your collection of favourite methods. And if you decide to use SessionLab’s free workshop planner tool, you can easily pull any activity from your personal or the public library to your workshop plans, and your workshop agenda’s timing automatically gets updated.

4) Design Method Toolkit

The MediaLAB Amsterdam Design Method Toolkit is a well-organised collection of design and research methods that enables you to get started and enrich your design process. You can find more than 50 practical tools with step-by-step guides on how to run design research, ideation, experimentation and creation within short iterations. If you run agile, team-based projects, then you will find useful inspiration in this toolkit.

5) IAF Methods Database

The IAF Methods Database is a set of facilitation tools and techniques collected and curated by IAF members. The purpose of the database is to serve facilitators by gathering and making accessible a breadth of facilitation methodologies and techniques. Part of the library — around 50 facilitation methods — is public to help facilitators promote the power of facilitation worldwide, while the full library is accessible for IAF members only.

Further useful resources

We highlighted the five platforms above due to their ease of use, each of them offering useful filters and search options. Thus, if you want to find an exercise for a specific purpose (e.g. team building) with a given time frame and group size, you can easily filter by these criteria.

However, there are many other gems on the web, too. While it might take a little more effort to find the exact tools you are looking for, you will certainly find valuable workshop activities and templates on the following sites:

6) Gamestorming

Gamestorming is a set of co-creation tools used by innovators around the world to facilitate meetings in the business world. These innovative activities aim to make meetings a great experience for participants while still delivering on effectiveness, short time frames and action.

You can find more than 50 Gamestorming activities with detailed step-by-step guides on the official Gamestorming website. And if you like a good old printed version to look over the Gamestorming methods all at once, you might like the Gamestorming book itself, too!

7) Design A Better Business Toolbox

Are you already familiar with the Business Model Canvas and the ingenious way it helps structure thinking on developing a business model? This toolbox offers a great collection of templates and canvases in a style similar to the BMC, mostly related to business design, such as the storytelling canvas, customer journey canvas, persona canvas and many more. You can find step-by-step guides on how to use each framework coupled with downloadable templates to use in your workshop.

8) Liberating Structures

The aim of Liberating Structures is to enhance creativity, trust and relational coordination while making every participant feel included and heard in meetings. You can find a structured set of 33 easy-to-learn workshop methods on their website. Liberating Structure methods help make meeting processes more explicit and understandable for everyone since it increases the ownership of solutions by including large groups of people. If you are just starting out with Liberating Structures, then you can find inspiration in several field stories that suggest sequences of use for the LS methods.

9) NCDD Resource Center

The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation is a network of innovators who bring people together across divides to tackle today’s toughest challenges. Their resource center features a vast quantity of facilitation and change management tools, and you can find over 180 tools and methods used for dialogue and deliberation listed in the Participatory Practices and Dialogue & Deliberation methods section of the resource center. The depth of write-up vary greatly from method to method, but you can find great assets among the methods.

10) Thiagi Group’s games

Thiagi’s website offers more than 400 free games and exercises with detailed descriptions, facilitation tips, and debriefing questions, ready-to-run for everyone. If you want to filter your search among the games, you might visit the SessionLab library where you can find a significant set of these activities shared with Thiagi’s permission. There you are able to search and filter based on tags, time and group size to find the activity you need.

We believe these online resources are worth checking out if you are looking for new tools and techniques for your next workshop or meeting. We hope they will save you time and help you find new and effective activities.

Have you got a resource you think is missing from this list? Let us know in the comments if you have any further suggestions for free useful workshop resources.

Originally published at www.sessionlab.com on April 4, 2018.

Top 10 free online resources for workshop activities (2018) was originally published in Delivery Matters on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Are you facilitating workshops, meetings or training sessions regularly? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or the MS Office toolkit combined with email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing your workflow?

Fortunately there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to prepare and conduct workshops.

The good thing is that you don’t have to pay a fortune to have the use of technology that helps you make your job easier as a facilitator.

In fact, there are plenty of free tools you can use to become more productive when in the process of preparing or following up a facilitated session.

We collected the most useful tools we have encountered while talking to SessionLab users: facilitators, corporate trainers and service designers as well as our own personal experience. It was an important factor for us that each of the tools had a fully functional free version available without time limitation so you can rely on these options long term.

We grouped the tools according to the type of tasks they are used for so you can find precisely what you need. The primary use case we considered was to support the workflow when you have face-to-face meetings or training sessions, though most of these tools are equally useful when you need to prepare online sessions.

You will find the following sections in the article:

• Creating surveys
• File storage and document sharing
• Video conferencing
• Online whiteboards
• Task management
• Note taking
• Session agenda planning
• Classroom engagement

Is your favorite tool not on the list? Let us know in the comments.

Creating surveys for needs assessment or evaluation

If you ask for feedback from participants and you want to go beyond using ‘happy sheets’, paper forms filled out right after the workshop on the spot, then you may decide to create an online survey after the session. Alternatively, you might want to conduct a needs assessment survey for the preparations. You can choose from a wide range of online survey tools that can do the job for you. Our favorites are:

• Google Forms allow you to create unlimited surveys with 6 types of questions and skip logic that can guide your participants through your survey depending on their answers. The service has seamless integration with Google’s other apps including Gmail and spreadsheets. It has a great advantage: unlike most of the competition that has usage limits in their free versions, Google Forms is absolutely free.
• As a relatively new kid on the block, Typeform has made filling out forms engaging and interactive. The forms look fresh and modern, promising that users are more likely to enjoy the survey experience and complete it all the way through. Typeform offers unlimited surveys with maximum 10 questions and 100 responses in the free version while the paid version adds extra features, such as advanced question types and conditional logic.
• Having been around since 1999, SurveyMonkey is one of the longest running online survey services in the world. SurveyMonkey does the basics and does them well, providing a reliable alternative. In the free version, however, you will be limited to 10 questions, 100 respondents per survey and no possibility to export your data.

Cloud storage and document sharing with your co-workers

For most projects you take part in, sooner or later you will have an endless amount of documents: meeting memos, PowerPoint decks, a batch of documents you receive from your client and dozens of spreadsheets with session agendas, registrations forms… and the list can be continued. We all usually find a way to dump all these documents into the right folder on our hard drive but what happens when you need to share them with various co-workers to work collaboratively? And what if you work with different people on different projects?

Online file storage and sharing solutions allow you to store all your files in the cloud and access them whether you are on your desktop, phone or tablet. What’s more you can easily share the documents with your colleagues and work on them simultaneously. The good thing is that you have plenty of services to choose from, most notably:

• Dropbox, a pioneer in this market with their reliable and easy-to-use syncing and file sharing system. The free option offers 2GB of storage, although the full-text search that helps you find any piece of information within your document is only available in the paid version. The service is very easy to set up and rightfully praised for the clean design.
• Google Drive, offering 15GB free storage, this has the added benefit of a built-in office suite where you can edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations even if you created the document in another program. Working together real-time on shared Google documents is a great feature and, similar to Dropbox, you can easily invite collaborators to any document or folder of yours.
• OneDrive offers 5GB of free storage, a seamless integration to Windows, therefore it works especially well if you have a Windows PC, tablet and phone, and need to get to your files from any device with minimum effort.

As with many online tools, some of your clients might be sensitive about having data about their business stored in the cloud. For this reason, it’s useful to consider Box, which has more sophisticated collaboration and privacy control options for the business and enterprise users.

Video conferencing — Communicate with your colleagues or clients while working remotely

The difficulty of working with someone who is sitting somewhere else can be reduced when you see each other or you are watching the same screen via screensharing. The solutions to this were pioneered by Skype and Google Hangouts initially, with some other really noteworthy options emerging in the last few years. Let’s see what the best options are:

• Zoom provides exceptionally reliable quality, minimizing audio or video latency issues that you usually encounter with most video conferencing applications. It has a wide variety of features available both for individual and business needs including the scheduling of calls, a dial-in phone number and recording audio and video calls even on the free service plan. The only downside is the 40 minute call limit for group calls on the free version (while there is no time limit for one-to-one calls).
• Appear.in comes in to help when all other tools fail: you just open a video conferencing room, send the link to your guests and they can join without having to install any application or create an account. (Only a browser extension is needed to be added). It is a lightweight video chat tool with less features than Zoom but offers unprecedented ease of use. The free plan offers group video conferencing and screen sharing, although it is recommended that you use the paid version when having more than 4–6 participants in order to ensure stable call quality.
• Skype was among the first players in peer-to-peer video conferencing and as it has been widely adopted now it’s often a straightforward option for calling contacts who have Skype accounts. On the downside, there is a long history of Skype calls suffering from quality issues and compatibility issues often hinder group calls. Unfortunately, it is also extremely difficult communicating with someone who uses the business version of Skype (Lync) while you are using the regular version. Though Skype offer screen sharing and group video conferencing it seems to be taking way more resources from the computer than competing tools. On the upside, it’s a completely free option.
• Hangouts require all members to have a Google Plus account and it provides a cross-platform functionality similar to Skype. It became well-known for its high video quality and for offering better quality calls when bandwidth is low. Additionally, Hangouts offers many business-savvy features: such as, creating webinars. Hangouts comes with an ‘On Air’ feature that can be shared with the world and can be recorded and stored on YouTube.

Online whiteboards

Have you ever had to ideate or brainstorm with people who were at different locations? Or even planning a series of workshops with a remote team? Seeing each other while video conferencing makes remote working easier. But what happens to the magic of being in the same room and letting the group’s creativity spark by working on the same whiteboard? Complex problem solving often requires a visual platform to brainstorm and come up with creative ideas and online whiteboards can better replicate the feeling of working together in person.

Both Realtimeboard and Deekit offer an endless flexible space where you can collaborate and share ideas. You can create an online canvas and use that as a simple whiteboard for jotting down ideas, or as an infinite board for building a project with a remote team. They allow the creation of mockups and schemes, you can quickly add stickers, write down ideas and leave feedback

• Realtimeboard: Besides the regular online whiteboard features of uploading images, creating notes and drawing in different colors and sizes in freehand mode the app offers a great template library to conveniently find the right structure you need for your whiteboard. The free version offers up to 3 boards for your team.
• Deekit also allows participants to write and sketch anywhere on your board, embed content from the web, and allows you to export boards to share them with others. The template library helps a lot in getting started with the right style of whiteboard for your work. The free version offers 4 boards with unlimited team members.

Manage tasks collaboratively

Do you have an endless to-do-list while having multiple facilitation assignments? Set a meeting with your next client, replace all the missing pieces of sticky notes and wallpapers from your magical workshop kit, checking in with the catering about the planned breaks and lunch for your session tomorrow, prepare and send survey to participants for your next event… the list is endless when you juggle multiple meetings and workshops that you need to facilitate.

There are a vast amount of task management software tools available on the market. Some are part of complex project management suites, while others are dedicated only to keeping your tasks in order. You can find our favorite ones below:

• Trello offers a flexible and visual way to organize anything with anyone. Trello is organized in boards inspired by Kanban methodology. You can add lists to the board and cards to the lists. Each card can have individual checklists, uploaded documents or pictures and discussion in the form of comments. You can easily invite your co-workers to sign up for their own free Trello account. Instead of using emails and instant messages, you can use Trello to communicate. You may create one board for each of your projects or just have one comprehensive board with multiple lists to keep yourself on track. Trello add-ons help you power up your boards: for example you can display all your to-dos in a calendar view.
• Wunderlist is more specialized towards personal organization in their free plan: you can create different lists and to-dos, prioritize your lists and set reminders and due dates. It also offers a sharing function, so you can send the training preparation list to your co-trainer.
• If you have a bigger project you may want to use a more specialized project management software to help your team collaborate without getting flooded by emails. Asana is an intuitive task-management system that works best for teams seeking real-time interaction and its basic version is free for up to 15 users.

All three of the tools above have easy-to-use mobile versions and allow syncing over devices. With either of them you can drop lengthy email threads and out-of-date spreadsheets so you can get your tasks organized and collaborate effectively with your co-facilitators. You can also export your tasks to your calendar to make sure you don’t miss any to-do item.

Taking notes and organizing information

Noting down various bits of information during a session design process is crucial: when talking with clients, jotting down some personal follow-up steps, saving useful links and so on. Having your trusted notebook with you is essential to register all the information you need in one place, but organizing, finding, and sharing your notes is easier when using digital tools.

Doing this online has never been easier. There are plenty of apps that allow you to write down thoughts, sync them across devices and share them with your colleagues. Below you can find the most popular options with somewhat different strengths:

• Evernote lets you easily capture, organize, and find content from the Web. You can highlight text on the web, take screenshots, write your own notes, etc. The notes can be tagged, shared, formatted (to some extent) and you can even assign tasks to them. These are just some of its many features.
• Microsoft OneNote has a similar set of features to Evernote but the approach in organizing your notes is different. OneNote supports a more defined structure, as you can have several levels of notebooks, pages and subpages. It also provides richer formatting options, which are especially useful when doing creative work as it allows you to start typing anywhere on the page.
• We mentioned Google Drive combined with Google Docs earlier as a full stack alternative for cloud storage and document management. Simply setting up your structure of folders — e.g. one that allows you to structure your documents by client or date — can be a simple alternative to store all your notes and other documents and have everything synced online to multiple devices.

Although they differ in the way they work, what they have in common is the most important advice for using any software for taking notes: you actually need to remember to use it. These tools really become useful when all your notes are in the same place and you can use powerful search and sharing features.

Session agenda planning

If you are planning to facilitate a group session that spans more than a couple of hours and you have different workshop activities, theory blocks, team building games and energizer activities, then you likely need to have some sort of agenda to plan the sequence of these activities.

A simple pen and paper might just do the trick for you, but what if you’re working together with some other people on the agenda or simply need to share it with your client? If you want to avoid having dozens of different versions of Excel or Word files, then an online editable agenda might come handy

• SessionLab is an online session planner tool for anyone who is doing facilitated sessions. It provides a platform that is designed for the flexible and iterative process of building up a workshop or meeting agenda — making your process design work a real ‘flow experience’. As you build up your session outline, all the various modules and exercises you enter into the system become searchable and reusable by you. Color-coding helps you to get a balanced interaction mix for your session to keep your participants engaged. When looking for new inspiration, you can find facilitation techniques and team building and workshop activities in a public library of facilitation methods. SessionLab allows you to also share the workshop plans with your clients or colleagues and work together on them simultaneously. And yes, we’re blowing our own horn, but mainly because we love using it.

• Google Sheets: The spreadsheet application of Google has become a worthwhile online alternative to Microsoft Excel. So if you are a hardcore spreadsheets fan loving to tinker with rows and columns to turn them into workshop timetables then Google Sheets offers you most of the features you need for creating and sharing session agendas. Real-time commenting and revision tracking are highly useful for the collaborative work and integration with Google Drive cloud storage allows you to easily find content in your sessions in your Drive.

Classroom engagement tools

Have you ever run a workshop or meeting where you wanted to quickly poll the opinions of all your participants? Workshops and training sessions are meant to be interactive, two-way communication helps to keep your group engaged.

As long as the size of your group allows, you might use plenary conversations so each participant is able to share and elaborate their opinion on the subject at hand. You might even use some structured meeting facilitation method like a ‘flashlight’ or one-breath feedback to effectively survey qualitative insights from your group members.

However, there might be some scenarios where the live interaction gets difficult. Imagine running a large group session with dozens of participants. Or a virtual session. Having a platform to easily poll your participants and visualize the results can be useful in such cases.

This is where classroom engagement tools come into the picture. We will focus on two solutions that allow you to poll your participants:

• Mentimeter allows you to create questions (such as multiple choice questions) in their web application and participants can answer them from their mobile devices. The great thing is that you can instantly visualize everyone’s opinion and display the results real-time to the group. It helps your participants to feel engaged, which is especially important for a large group workshop. It works really well on mobile devices with a streamlined user experience and the free version allows you to create two polls and five quiz questions per presentation.
• Sli.do also offers a participant polling functionality and a mobile app for your participants. The free version allows you to have 3 polls per event. Similarly to Mentimeter, it also supports Q&A, so your meeting participants can post their questions at any time via the mobile application.

Bonus: Tools are only part of the solution and while they can make your work easier, the quality of your sessions will come from a thoughtfully designed set of activities . Check out our post on various free online resources for workshop activities.

All these online tools are worth checking out, and hopefully they will save you time and make your facilitation related work go even more smoothly. Let us know in the comments if you missed something on the list!

Originally published at www.sessionlab.com on March 10, 2018.

The most useful free online tools for workshops and meetings was originally published in Delivery Matters on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.