Summary of the Women In Leadership Event Hosted by B:Social

Since January, the Women In Leadership team has been working to create the perfect Zoom event that was both informative and engaging to audience members. On April 20th, 2021 we were able to put all of our planning into action as we successfully hosted Beautiful Social’s 3rd annual Women in Leadership Event. The panel was a great success not only to us, but to the audience members as well. We had roughly 35 students and faculty attend our session. Our panelists Emily McCracken and Abbey Piro gave incredibly insightful advice and answers to the questions we had prepared for them. Emily and Abbey were both a delight and gave great insight on what it is like being a female in the workforce. Throughout the entire event, audience members were participating with us and our panelists. As a group we were most proud of how we were able to make our online Zoom panel feel like an in person event. Below are tips on how we were able to accomplish this feat. 

Get the audience engaged early

As students who are constantly on Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic we knew there was nothing worse than sitting in a Zoom class where no one in the audience felt comfortable participating. To help alleviate some of this awkwardness as a group we decided to play ice breaker bingo. Panelists and audience members were sent a PDF of a bingo card that we designed in the chat and had a few minutes to fill out the card. Once those few minutes were up we reconvened as a group and asked audience members to use the raise hand function if they checked off the prompt in the box. An example prompt was do you have a twin? We also were able to have people elboate on their answers in the chat so for example, one of the prompts was have you ever travelled outside the US. Then in the chat we had participants list the forgein countries they had traveled to. By playing ice breaker BINGO it helped set the tone for the event early on and allowed participants to become comfortable with speaking to us and the panelists.

Ask relevant questions 

As a group we made the decision to try and keep the questions more general to women in leadership as opposed to asking questions specific to the non profit or communications industry. By doing this we were able to attract a larger audience as well as have conversations that were relevant to women in every work field. We also asked questions about tough subjects like how to deal with gender discinimation in the workforce and the importance of male advocates. By not shying away from tough subjects and asking questions where the answers would specifically give wonderful advice for college aged students to follow allowed us to foster an insightful conversation that gave genuine advice to students. 

Encourage the audience to use the chat feature throughout the entirety of the presentation

Throughout the presentation one of the group members would be monitoring the activity in the chat as well as asking questions and commenting on points our panelists made. This again helped contribute to audience engagement.

Switch up your speakers 

Working in a group of five gave us the opportunity to split up the speaking roles evenly. This ensured that no group member was talking for too long and allowed audience members to get to know different people and hear from different perspectives.

If you are interested in hearing about the amazing advice Abbey and Emily gave to our audience members or you want to see our Zoom techniques in action watch the event for yourself!