How to engage remote audiences in virtual events: networking, workshops, meetings and team-building sessions

Thanks to the Internet, all forms of human interactions can be replicated virtually. As technology progresses, engaging and interactive virtual events are not only possible, but essential for businesses and communities to expand their impacts beyond the limitation of physical presence. Virtual events are also a good alternative for events that would otherwise be postponed or canceled due to critical situations like the Coronavirus. 

While virtual events and virtual summit can potentially attract audiences from around the world, keeping these audiences engaged is far more challenging than in offline events. Your virtual audience is usually disengaged with a short attention span, and that’s why you should treat them like 5-year-olds to ensure everyone has a valuable and meaningful time. And Toasty is exactly designed to tackle this.

How does Toasty work?

Toasty is built around small group activities that encourage everyone’s participation so that it is a 3-dimensional engagement, instead of a one-way approach that most webinars or online events take.

It is super easy to use Toasty since it is based on the web. The only thing you need to do is to share a Toasty link with your audience, and participants can then join via their web browsers without any download or installation.

Now here are some examples of how you can best utilize Toasty to make it engaging for your virtual events, workshops, or meetings.

6 group activities for virtual events

Different types of virtual events are facing different challenges in audience engagement. Let’s take a look at how different virtual events can utilize Toasty to boost attendee engagement.

#1 Team building: Strengthening personal connections

People’s first impressions on one another are often wrong.

Set up Who Said That to let people share their first impressions with each other.

1. In your Toasty session, choose Who Said That
2. Choose from our question templates (or even create your own!)
3. During the session, put the assigned groups to Zoom Breakout Rooms to play Who Said That 🎉🎉

#2 Team building: Brainstorming and story sharing

Team building is just as essential for remote teams as teams working in the same office. Use Toasty to provide a space for reflection after a major project.

1. In your Toasty session, choose Conversation cards activities
2. Choose Custom category
3. Add questions relevant to your team reflection, such as:
   • What have we done well in this project?
   • What should we improve next time?
   • What is our biggest learning from this project?
   • What about the project that has made you grow as a person?
4. During the session, put the Toasty groups to Zoom Breakout Rooms for reflection

#3 Meetings: Conducting group discussions

Unlike participants in a seminar, participants in virtual sessions are thousands of miles away from each other. Fortunately, Toasty Group Response makes remote group discussions possible and makes it extremely easy for each group to share their findings/ideas with the entire audience.

1. In your Toasty session, choose Group response activities
2. Provide instruction on group activity, such as:
   • Ask the group to brainstorm on a topic
   • Ask the group to collaborate to find the answer to a question
   • Ask the group to come up with a mindmap of today’s’ learning
   • Ask the group to reflect what they learned today
3. During the session, put the Toasty groups to Zoom Breakout Rooms for discussion
4. After the discussion, bring everyone back to the main meeting room via Zoom
5. Share Toasty TV via Zoom. Let the groups submit answers and vote for the best answer

#4 Workshops/Events: Running live Q&A

1. In your Toasty session, go to the Q&A tab
2. Turn on Audience Q&A
3. Share Toasty TV via Zoom.
4. Inform your audience to submit Q&A any time during the session

#5 Workshops/Events: Using live Poll as icebreaking

1. In your Toasty session –> Activities –> Form Groups
2. Choose a question from our templates (or even create your own!)
3. During the session, share Toasty TV via Zoom, start the session and let your audiences vote
4. Poll result will be shared on Toasty TV in real-time

#6 Networking: Getting the conversation started

People hate small talks in person. People hate small talks online.
Set up Conversation Cards to foster meaningful conversations among remote audiences.

1. In your Toasty session, choose Conversation cards activities
2. Choose from one of the Conversation cards templates (or even create your own!)
3. During the session, put the assigned groups to Zoom Breakout Rooms to play Conversation Cards 🎉🎉

Are you ready to bring the audience engagement to your next virtual events?

If you are looking for a platform to provide a facilitated experience to drive audience-audience interactions, learn more about Toasty which is currently offering a discount during the Coronavirus period.

Learn more about Toasty