Can you do breakouts in a zoom webinar? No.
Well, actually you cannot in a zoom webinar, in a zoom meeting you can do breakouts, but in this video I’m going to show you 3 of my favorite workaround techniques to create really meaningful engagement even though you cannot do breakouts in a zoom webinar. If you’re still confused about what a zoom webinar and a zoom meeting is, you might need to actually just go back to 2020 and learn that. But more realistically, you can check out this blog here which parses out a meeting from a webinar because there are different purposes for each. That’s not what I’m going to do in this video, I’m just going to share 3 really clever engagement techniques for a zoom webinar to maximize that connection and engagement that you have with people online.
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I’m gonna share the these 3 engagement techniques uh really quickly in this video and if you stick around to the end, I’m gonna share a bonus idea or activity that creates impact months and months after a webinar happens. In fact, I’ve had a lot of people come back to me and say, “Chad, I still am in connection in communication with this person because of this little exercise you led.”
Alphabet Likert Scale
If you’re on a webinar, you don’t have access to breakouts, you probably are not going to be unmuting people because you don’t even have people’s voices. You’re basically limited to the engagement in the chat. And if that’s the case, you want to find creative ways for everyone to quickly engage in the chat. One way is with a likert scale. If I’m on a zoom meeting, I’ll have people kind of hold up 10 fingers, but you don’t have video of participants on a webinar. And so, in the chat, rather than just giving them a scale of 1 to 10 in the chat, which you could do that’s fine.
Create the Alphabet Likert scale. From a scale of A to Z, “Z” being this is the best webinar you’ve ever been to to “A,” I wish I never showed up but I just can’t find the exit button, where are you at n that spectrum and go ahead and type a letter. If you get a lot of M’s you know you need to do better in the webinar, if you get a lot of Z’s and X’s and Y’s, you know that you’re doing pretty well and that the group is really enjoying the webinar. A great way to gauge collective group feedback, you can also do that with just simple “yes” or “no’s”. So, getting- you don’t need to launch a poll for this necessarily. Just to say, “Hey, I’ve got two stories I could potentially share, this one about this, or this one about this. Which one feels more important? A or B?” You can just have people say “A” or “B” to that.
Harvesting
I love this one. It is the coolest feature of gathering online. You cannot do this if you gather in person. I know there’s like so much awesomeness of being in person at a conference with all these people and the organic interactions and the bumpings and whatever all of that is. But online, you cannot harvest ideas as quickly and as efficiently as this. Here’s simply what I would do, if I go to share content on a webinar. For example, if I’m teaching about the idea of connection before content with a group, I might stop on a webinar and say, “Before I tell you anything that I know about connection before content, can you write one really clever strategy or idea or way that you’ve gotten your teams, your groups, your participants to connect? Can you type that into the chat in a way that anybody reading it can pick up that idea and apply it to their own context.” You know, I did this the other day with Ohio state and there were 500 people on the call, and then I said- once those 500 responses were in, I said, “All right, you’re all gold miners. I’m gonna play a song and for 2 minutes, go find the golden nuggets and the gems that lie in this chat. There’s some really brilliant wisdom that might be perfectly timed for you, or for a meeting, or a session you have coming up in the future or an event you have coming up next month or something. Read through this chat and copy and paste at least 1 but a maximum of 3 ideas that you want to just, boom steal from the collective knowledge of the group. That idea harvesting, like that should happen more.
The fact that webinars happen and you only get to hear 1 person’s perspective just talking at you, makes me insane sometimes. It literally makes me feel a little bit crazy when 1 person speaks and 500 human brains, which means if you’re speaking for an hour, that’s 500 hours of human attention. That’s like you’ve got to tap into that collective knowledge. A webinar is a fantastic format to do it and yet 98 percent of people don’t. You can be the 2 percent because you watched this video. If you’ve now entered the 2 percent, you should also subscribe to this video. I think there’s a button you can do that. Somebody told me on YouTube there’s a like button, I haven’t seen it before. It looks like a thumbs up but, if you’re enjoying this I would love for you to hit that like button. It does lots of lovely things for algorithms that I don’t understand.
Jam Board Brainstorming
Jamboard- I’m referring to actually Google jamboard, which is a free software that you can use. It’s like google docs, just like you create a google doc, you can create a google jam board. It’s A collaborative whiteboard, so you can send a link out to a group on a webinar, or if you’ve got a lot of people, you send out multiple links to people on that webinar and have them jump in and contribute ideas.
I was working with one company, and we were kind of- it was their annual retreat and they’re kind of visioning for the future. I we actually had them all create a newspaper headline for 2030 that was about their company. They all went into google jam board and created sticky notes with multiple ideas there that everybody could see simultaneously. Even though you don’t have people on video or they can’t talk, you can still get a ton of really cool content. That’s nice because you have an artifact afterward that you can send as a follow-up to people in a webinar.
Network Linking
In a webinar you can encourage people to shamelessly plug their LinkedIn or their Instagram or whatever social they want people to follow them at. Everybody go grab that link, paste it into the chat and just play a song or 2 and give people the challenge of adding as many people as possible on this call to their network. And this works, I would be you know cautious about when or where how you do this, but this works really well if you gather a really niche group of people together. Like I do a lot of work with orientation programs at universities, if I’m on a call with 60 directors of student orientation at new universities, I’m doing that exercise because I totally want all of those 60 people to see each other’s LinkedIn posts or other things or, when they leave their job I want them to get a job at that other university.
I want to connect that group. It’s such a value add to be able to connect a niche or a community, and you have the power to do that in a webinar in the matter of like 3 or 4 minutes. Grab a link, paste it, play a song, let everybody connect with each other digitally in that way. Then, those connections last for months and months, years and years, maybe even a decade or 2 after that one single webinar, you gave way back in 2021.