Ah, time to engage people in an online presentation. A sea of black boxes, some cameras on, some cameras off. Does this sound familiar?
If you present online in any format, the five examples below will transform the way you host any virtual meeting, whether it is a thousand-person online conference or a 10-person meeting with a regional team you have worked with for five years.
A quick note before we dive in: these ideas map to the timeline of your gathering. Every event you host has a beginning, an end, and a time associated with it. Say it starts at 9:00 a.m. and ends at 11:00 a.m. For the record, I would never keep people online in a synchronous meeting for more than two hours. Ideally, 90 minutes is the max before I give them at least a half-hour break to go offscreen, walk outside, stretch, and get out of their virtual Zoom jail cell.
1. Be an Usher: Start Engaging Before the Meeting Starts
Think about the last event you walked into that was in a theater. If it was a really good show, there was probably somebody dressed in all black who said, “Welcome,” and showed you where to sit. They were called an usher. In person, their job kind of stopped there.
If you want to engage an audience online, your role in the couple minutes leading up to the start, say 8:57 to 9:02 a.m., is to be an usher. But do not show people where to sit, because that is also where they are going to fall asleep. Show people what to do. Invite people immediately and purposefully to engage.
For example, as people enter my room, I might hold up a question and say, “Hey, y’all, as you’re coming in, people are getting Wi-Fi sorted, switching from their car to their laptop. I want to start off with something that will be useful to everybody. Can you share your response to this question: What’s a memorable piece of advice that you’ve received?”
If I really want to make it purposeful, I attach something related to the purpose of the gathering to the end of that question. If you are meeting to review quarterly finances, it becomes: What is a meaningful piece of advice you have received related to keeping the quarter’s books straight?
My friend Mark Collard would call this an unofficial start. It is a rolling start. It does not require everybody to be there, but it is an immediate invite that sets the tone for contribution and engagement. Most people instead try to play engaging music, and I love music, but it puts people into the role of consumer. They are just passively taking it in. Some people will like your music and some will not, so immediately you have critics in the room. If you want to engage people, you have to let people know, in a safe way, that their presence is required.
2. Create a Context Hook
If you have a hundred people coming online, you do not have one meeting. You have a hundred meetings, because everything in their life is different except for the link they clicked to get there. Different temperature, different time zone, different day, different stressors, different overflowing inboxes. Everything is different except the link. So you have to do something that creates one shared experience.
Here is an edgy example, and most people do not do this. Usually some people have videos on and some have videos off. As a context hook, actually say, “Hey, everybody, as we get started, little odd, can everyone turn their videos off?” You included. Now that everybody’s video is off, say, “All right, welcome to podcast mode. Now that we’re in podcast mode, can you go grab an object that represents something that’s really important to you, bring it back to the desk, turn on your video, but keep your object below the camera.”
Now everybody is participating, and you have given people a reason to turn on their video. The reason is not you-focused. It is not “please turn on your videos so I don’t have to stare at black boxes.” It is “turn on your videos because in a minute I’m going to invite you to hold up your object, switch into gallery view, and poke around to see what objects other folks grabbed.” Depending on the meeting size, I will actually have people unmute and ask questions about those objects.
The framing might be: “You have individual things that you care about. We’re here to meet on this topic, and I want whatever we do today to tie into something that you care about.” That is a little bit of connection before content.
3. Connection Before Content: Breakouts or Collaborative Journaling
If you have the ability to do breakouts, I am always going to fight to get people into small groups. As my friend and mentor Peter Block would say, small groups are the units of transformation. If you have a thousand people together, even if it is inconvenient, even if tech might break, it is worth the risk to get people into groups of three around a question that connects to the purpose of why they are there. Creating that relatedness might be the most valuable time somebody spends, because things move quicker once connection and relatedness are established.
If you cannot do breakouts, come back to the unofficial start question. I will say, “At the unofficial start, I asked you all to type a memorable piece of advice, and like often happens in a virtual context, you typed quick little one-word or one-phrase snippets. We’re going to do an exercise called collaborative journaling. I’m going to hold up a question and give you a solid two minutes to write a really thoughtful response, as if you were teaching somebody else. When the timer hits zero, hit enter all at the same time. Then I’ll set the clock for another two or three minutes, have you scroll up, and harvest as much awesome wisdom and advice from this group as you possibly can.”
Do you see how in that moment you are doing something virtually that you cannot do in person? You are inviting everyone to speak at the exact same time. In person, that would be loud, chaotic, and frustrating. But online: enter, boom, thousands of words of experience and wisdom and ideas, without groupthink getting in the way and without “what will my boss think?” Please ruthlessly steal and reinterpret that idea into your own context.
Want to try a question-driven opener with your own group? Download our free printable cards, book excerpts, and more here.
4. Hand the Content Over to Your Audience
Likely, if you are trying to make an online presentation interactive, you have a bunch of content you need to share, and most of your time will be spent sharing it. Let me make it really clear. If you have slides or content of any kind to present, you can either put up the slide and talk through it, or you can hand the content over to people and turn it into an experience.
You can say, “Hey, everybody, in a minute I’m going to put up a slide, and there are three words missing in the slide. Your job is to read it and try to fill in the three correct words. Ready? Go.” No matter how entertaining and engaging you are as a presenter, that exercise will be far more useful for passing content through somebody’s prefrontal cortex. They actually think about it, synthesize it, and figure out the missing gaps. Even people who are forced to be in a training will at least, with their arms crossed, look at the blanks and wonder what might go there.
5. Close in a Way That Leaves People Wanting to Come Back
You have to end in a way that leaves people wanting to come back. If you end in a rush, trying to cram through the last few slides, disengagement plummets. If you end by asking “any questions?”, that is a death sentence to engagement. Get logistics out of the way so you can end on a high note.
Most presenters run out of time. There is never enough time, so most presenters rush the ending. The best thing you can do for engagement, and for building a culture of engagement, is to end really intentionally with a compelling invitation for people to participate or contribute.
When I am leading an online presentation, I actually set an alarm 5 to 10 minutes before the official end time. I will hold a little music player up to my microphone playing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and first of all, it is an attention reset. What is happening? Is that playing on my device? Everybody comes back. Then I say something to the effect of: “Hey, this is a really smart group. You chose to give me your presence and attention today. I’d love to end with your words rather than mine. I’ll give you 10 seconds of productive silence to think of your own response to this question, and then we’ll unmute and popcorn out a handful of responses. I’ll jump in to say thank you, and that will end our time.”
The question, really simply: related to our time together online, what really struck you? What came out as an aha, hit you, was useful? Or the English-second-language-friendly version: What did you notice about the last hour? Ten seconds to think. Get ready to find the unmute button. Great. What struck you?
You get these popcorns from people, humans with different larynxes than your own, and it is a 10 times more engaging way to wrap up. It might even leave people wanting to come back, because the people who choose to share will share the best of the session without you saying a word. You are just reviewing the best-of highlights for people.
Bonus tip: if you are closing but you have another session coming up, another training, or they are coming back tomorrow for a conference, a really amazing alternative closing is having people fill in this sentence: “I would love to learn more about blank.” Then your unofficial start at the beginning of the next session can tie right into all of those responses.
Turn Your Presentation Into a Conversation
All of these ideas take a presentation and turn it into a really dynamic conversation, even at scale with a thousand people on the internet. If you want more ideas like these, I wrote a whole book on this called How to Make Virtual Engagement Easy.
Want to go deeper? Register your interest for The Contribution Method this spring, a live masterclass where you’ll learn to design sessions people actually want to be in.
I’m Chad Littlefield. I do this for a weird living. Have an awesome day.
