6 Ways to Boost Engagement During Online Workshops

Facilitating an online workshop takes more thought than a physical one, especially around keeping attendees engaged. Losing the interest of a virtual audience doesn’t necessarily mean the activities weren’t targeted correctly; it may point to poor delivery. Fortunately, there are ways to keep hold of your participants’ attention. 

Have a Singular Goal

When people attend online workshops, they’re surrounded by distractions in their immediate environment. Therefore, to avoid creating even more chaos, keep the workshop’s focus aimed at one objective. To help establish purpose, you need to make a delivery before the workshop begins. This can be as simple as sending out an advance email detailing the purpose of the meeting, which helps to ground the content and build suitable expectations.

Put Effective Transitions in Place

When activities finish, your participants will need a break to refresh their interest. You can use this downtime to gauge your participants’ interest and engagement levels. For example, live word cloud polls allow you to pose questions to your audience and see their answers in an interesting format that highlights the most common trends. Questions you can ask in your word cloud polls include “Using an emoji, how are you feeling at this point?”.

Encourage Low Energy Honesty

Online workshops are tiring, but your audience won’t tell you when they need a break unless you ask. Therefore, make it clear that feelings of fatigue are perfectly acceptable, and that time can be allocated for additional breaks. Going back to the live word cloud, you could use these to measure attendee energy levels.

Boost Everything by 20%

Communicating virtually is much more challenging than in person because non-verbal cues are much harder to deliver. Therefore, to help participants follow the workshop flow, everything needs to be boosted by 20%, including patience, enthusiasm, explanations, and pauses. Typically, a 10 minutes break needs to follow each 45-minute activity.

Use EARS Principles for Listening

When listening to participants, you need to be 100% present. Essentially, this means that all of your attention is turned to the words being said, with nothing given to your mental comments. An effective way to achieve mindful listening is by following EARS:

• E – Have excitement about what is being expressed.
• A – Demonstrate your attention level by asking probing questions.
• R – Recalling the information they’ve already mentioned will show you’ve taken in all their words.
• S – Synthesising what is being said into preceding conversations.

Whenever you feel your mind wandering when participants are talking, bring yourself back to the conversation by using the mindful principles of EARS.

Use the Correct Tools

There are countless tools out there for hosting virtual workshops, but you need to choose one that will suit your needs. For example, a fantastic tool is Miro, which has an intuitive attention manager built into it.

A successful digital workshop will leave participants wanting more, which is a challenging feat to accomplish. If you can integrate everything listed above into your workshop delivery, you’ll find engagement rates soar.