The new rules of engagement: learning to conduct a successful online meetup

Since we made the move to online events in March, we’ve been working out through trial and error how we might create the same engaging experiences that we’ve learnt to do for our in-person events.

Our events have been running for almost three years and we worked out early on that one of our main strengths lies in the workshop element of our meetups.

It’s great to go to a physical event and hear a good speaker talk about something interesting. I’ve met new people and learnt some cool things. But I know I have wondered to myself on at least one of these occasions whether that whole talk might have actually been a Medium article I had open in one of the three million tabs on my browser at home.

One of our wonderful meetups of 2019

What has really made a meetup memorable and worth it, is when I’ve walked away with a skill or had to actually use my brain in a different way to make something tangible. And in the process I’ve (usually) been enriched by working with a team of people with different experiences and perspectives on something we can take back to work or life the next and add to our figurative (or literal) toolbox.

And so, using both personal experiences and feedback from the community, we started changing how we curated our own events.

Where we used to have two speakers before the workshop, we brought it down to one. Where we used to have three unconnected parts to our events, we started linking the subject of a talk to that of the proceeding workshop. Where we used to see speaker and workshop as separate, we started crafting the talk as more of an introduction to the workshop. We also started creating guidelines and vetting content.

Then came a pandemic and subsequent lockdown and it was suddenly not really worth the risk anymore, from both a health and legal perspective.

Going virtual

We have learnt since then that the dynamics and motivations for attending an event online are very different. Being part of a community is just as important, in some ways even more so now than before, but what does that mean when you have no sharpies and sticky notes on the table to share during the workshops, and no slightly-too-warm white wine and a Woollies cupcake to share during the breaks?

While it is the workshop that makes it that extra bit worth attending in person, it’s the workshop part of our online events where we started seeing people drop off most heavily. If I look at my own behaviour in the last few months attending a few online meetups/ discussions/ talks, I can’t say I’m not guilty of quietly dropping off the call when it seems like I’m going to have to put in more effort.

When I’ve spent my day in meetings saying “can you hear me now” or “I think I lost you there” or “you’re on mute”, the thought of doing the same with a group of potential strangers, without an immediately available glass of wine, is not very attractive.

So although our first online meetups were awesome and enjoyed by all, we were still looking for that je ne sais quoi, or, how to keep people on the line till the end.

The first learning curve

Thus we started to adapt again, with a few changes to our format, including:

1. Making the events shorter. It’s all very well at an in-person event where you can have a good break in the middle and talk to people and exercise your legs and eyes, but when you have to sit in one spot with your extremities getting cold from lack of circulation for three hours, it’s just too much. Ninety minutes is about manageable.
2. Ask people to put their cameras on if possible during the talk so the speaker can see who they are speaking to and everyone gets the feeling of being there with other real human beings.
3. Get yo’ self access to a premium Zoom account. Our first online speaker, Alex, has given us access to his, and we are continuously grateful. Being able to put people in breakout rooms to do exercises in small groups is the literal best.
4. Provide very clear instructions for groups and easy access to resources to complete tasks. We’ve been creating a Google Drive folder for each group, within which they will find a document with step-by-step instructions and time allocations, as well as a Google Slide deck that has a template of whatever worksheet or canvas or map we are working on to fill in. We also recommend that each group assigns a timekeeper, scribe, and facilitator to make sure everything flows smoothly.

Alex Oloo leads our exciting first online meetup (see a writeup of that here)

When talk and workshop become one

While these all helped greatly, we still saw a fairly high drop-off rate. However, an added factor has seemed to address this issue, making our most recent event our most successful yet. And that was to mirror our in-person events and blur the line between talk and workshop.

At a pre-COVID event, you would sit down at your table in the groups with whom you will be participating in the workshop, get to know them, and stick with them till the end of the evening.

Now, Tracey is a great speaker and no doubt the material itself captivated people at our June online meetup. In addition, however, instead of having The Talk and then The Workshop, there were three different exercises interspersed in the talk.

After Tracey had given an introduction to the theory, everyone was given a case study, and people were sent into their breakout rooms to conduct their analyses and fill out worksheets using the concepts she had introduced us to.

Participants were then brought back for the next part of the talk, before being sent back into the same groups. This was repeated a third time.

From very early in the event attendees got introduced to their teammates and started a connection that was tied to the rest of the event. What resulted is that we had the lowest drop-off rate we’ve experienced so far, having started with 40 people and ending with 33.

We’ve thought about why this might be and a couple of options sprung to mind:

1. If you want to listen to the rest of the talk you have to be involved in the workshop too (perhaps a little cynical).
2. You’re not just an anonymous faceless person who can inconspicuously leave the call with no one noticing. Maybe people just feel it’s unfair to leave the rest of the team hanging without a good reason, when you’ve started this journey with them? Note: I say without a good reason because there are of course good reasons. During the second exercise I got a private message from one attendee who left because her electricity had gone out, asking me to explain to her team as she was so worried they would think she had just bailed on them.
3. Doing something practical with the material through the workshop may help consolidate information learnt as well as keep interest up in hearing the next bit of theory.
4. Smaller chunks of the talk are easier to process than sitting through the whole talk before having to focus your mind to get stuck into the workshop. Similarly, smaller chunks of workshop means less time to start getting bored.
5. If you get stuck on a particular concept, your team members are more invested in helping you get to grips with it.
6. There is less pressure to finish one big exercise in one block of time. The flip side of this is that there is more incentive to get involved in the workshop because it isn’t at the “end” of the event — you aren’t dedicating one big chunk of time to a task that presents little chance for feedback and improvement afterwards. Perhaps this is also why even at the end, although we were on schedule, there were people who actively wanted to stay on to present and discuss their ideas.

While there might be more to it, it seems this format compels people to stay and engage a bit more than our usual schtick, so you may see it becoming more of our usual schtick, as we continue to evolve as an organisation and a community and find new ways to improve our meetup experiences.

(Tracey conducted a fascinating talk and workshop on merging behavioural science and service design, which is available to watch in the recording below and on our Youtube channel. Note that there are three small breaks where the three exercises are introduced, but this doesn’t take away from the value of the material or the excellence of the presentation).