How to Host an Interactive Online Zoom Event
Since the pandemic has started having in-person events of any kind has been difficult. However, we are lucky enough to live in the digital age and have other options to connect with others virtually with the help of Zoom of course. While hosting events on Zoom seems like an answer to hosting events during the pandemic, many people are suffering from Zoom fatigue. It is hard for people to focus during an online session with distractions everywhere at home. Many others are simply just tired of staring at themselves on a screen all day. As the planning committee for the Women in Leadership event, we made sure to look for the best ways to keep an engaged audience on Zoom.
1. Creating a Time Schedule
When planning this event we knew to hold people's attention we should keep the event to around an hour and a half. This time frame gave us enough time to do different interactive activities with panelists and audience members while also being short enough that those in the audience would not get bored. With this, we created a detailed schedule for the event itself by giving each of the MC’s a specific time to talk so that the audience does not have to listen to one person the entire time and we can avoid lags in conversation. Having a detailed schedule will also allow us to stay organized for this event and make sure we don’t go over our hour and a half time limit.
Schedule of the Women In Leadership Event
2. Plan Activities to Keep the Audience Engaged
In our pre-planning meeting, we mapped out different games and activities we could play with the audience members and panelists to help break up the panelists just lecturing to the audience. We also did this so we can help ease some of the audience’s anxiety and get everyone comfortable with each other. Some of the ideas we came up with were a Zoom bingo card, trivia or a Kahoot on women's leadership facts and stats, or a short mindfulness session. Despite this event being online, we wanted to make sure it feels as real and in person as possible, we hope these activities will help facilitate that goal our ours.
3. Allow the audience time to meet with panelists they want to network
Since this event is geared towards empowering female undergrad students, we wanted to make sure they had an opportunity to speak and network with the women in their chosen field. To do this, we will either create breakout rooms that each audience member can choose to go to or we will do an open panelist and audience Q and A once we are done with the prepared question portion of the event.
4. Marketing the Event
Getting the word out about the event early and often is the key to success when planning an online event because this can help remind people when the event will take place and also entice people to come. We did this by designing flyers that we posted on both the Beautiful Social Instagram page as well as the Communications classrooms for those who have in-person classes. We also asked all the COM department professors to routinely remind their students about this event. This is a key driving art to get the audience we desire to have. Our target audience for this event is female students who are looking to learn more about opportunities and experiences past alumni have had in the working world as women.
Social Media flyer for our event
We hope that some of these tips can help you plan your future event the same way they helped our event! Please join us on April 20th to celebrate, discuss, and learn more about women’s leadership in our community.
