How often do you engage others via a virtual platform? We live and work in an era where improved communication technology means we no longer need to be in the same room to interact with others.

Examples may include:

• Internal business meetings
• Meetings/sales calls with clients or customers
• Training interventions or employee briefings

There are a number of platforms available, among them Cisco Webex and Adobe, but do we use these to their full potential?

Hands up if you’ve been on the receiving end of a webinar where you’ve simultaneously been checking your emails, browsing the internet, and have disappeared off to make a cuppa? Guilty. It’s very difficult to keep someone’s attention, much more so that in a face-to-face situation. If you’re just presenting content, how do you know you have the receiver’s attention? How do you know they’re engaged? Unless you get something back, you don’t.

Here are my top tips for making webinars engaging:

1. Invest time in planning your content. Make it visually stimulating. Keep words to a minimum and use images and diagrams to convey your message.

2. Get everyone on the call to introduce themselves at the start (assuming there aren’t too many of you!). This will make everyone feel more engaged from the start and will make them feel more inclined to contribute during the call.

3. Make the most of the functionality available to you to allow participants to engage. Webex and Adobe both have an annotation tool and also a whiteboard which allows people to write on the slides, and also a polling function, so you can ask the group questions as you go along. Take the time to learn what is at your disposal and use it!

4. Keep the webinar to a maximum of 45 minutes. Your participants will thank you for it! If you need longer, consider taking a 10 minute break with a countdown to restart.

5. As you would in a face to face meeting, get buy-in from the participants from the start. What’s in it for them? What will they get out of being active participants during the call? Make sure you then refer back to this at the end, make sure the objective has been met and everyone goes away with an action. And don’t forget to ask for feedback.

Please feel free to comment/discuss and get in touch.