Engaging Digital Sessions - Top tips for Consultants

It is super important to make sure our digital sessions are engaging for all the participants involved, this will help ensure that you can keep them engaged, learning and leverage the full benefit of the information you are sharing.

For some great tips on preparing for a digital engagement you can check out the information for consultants on preparing for a digital session with an NSO.

Top Tips‌ 1. Just because everyone is on screen doesn't mean we should fall back to old habits of long presentations with little engagement from the participants. Ensure you use plenty of different methods when planning your event and some of the great free tools out there to help you 2. Ensure you always have a break every 45 mins-1hr and never have a session lasting more than 2.5 hours or more than one session per day. Screen fatigue is real and you will lose the message that you are trying to deliver if you push on too hard.

3. Use breakout rooms to ensure there is working spaces for discussion and not just listening to a facilitator from members.

4. Ensure that you have a stable internet connection when you are delivering so that you are not worrying about your connection failing and be ready 30 mins before the start.

Always try to have a back-up host who can support you in the delivery, having more than one person speaking always make a session easier to listen to. Make sure they have access to all the same resources so they are able to step in if the worst happens and you get disconnected.

5. Do use the mute button to keep participants muted when they join meetings, this keeps background noise to a manageable level so everyone can enjoy the session.

Headphones also help to cut out background noise.

6. Use interesting slides that are not text heavy and as many visuals as possible to help keep messages clear and concise. You can find branded templates to use on the consultants hub.

7. Make it fun! We learn best when we are having fun so the more you can make your participants laugh the more engaged they will be 8. Encourage people to keep their cameras on to keep everyone accountable for staying engaged in the session and not doing other things! The more interactive methods you use here will also help keep people from drifting into other tasks.

9. Use collaboration tools like padlet etc for the spark discussions to flow just as if you were in a physical space 10. Ensure you are in a space that you can focus on the session with minimal distractions – shut out your pets and family!

11. Have lots of small 1 minute energisers that you can use to break up the session and keep people from being too fixed in one place

Engaging Digital SessionsEngaging Digital Sessions – Top Tips for Consultants

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