Creative Tips to Engage Your Audience in a Virtual Lunch and Learn Session
Virtual lunch and learn is a great way to digitally share information. It can be everything from informal training, thought leadership, or a sales presentation. When it comes to workday meetings, it’s very easy to become stuck in a routine.
If you have been noticing that your team members are becoming less engaged and motivated at work, why not spice things up by coming up with a fun virtual lunch and learn ideas. It’s a great way to bring people together to learn skills, show your appreciation with a complimentary lunch and encourage team building.
If you want to engage your audience in a virtual lunch and learn, below we share some creative ways to achieve this.
Pick a Topic That Matters
First off, choose a topic that will provide real value to your audience. If you’re unsure of what it is that your audience wants to learn about, ask for feedback or ask them directly. The goal is to make your attendees feel like they have learned something new from the session. To avoid engagement dropping, don’t make the session too knowledge-dense.
If you’re having trouble coming up with good topic ideas, look into your existing survey data or customer feedback to get a sense of what your attendees might want to learn about. You can also plan a lunch and learn about a company event. For example, if you released a new product, hosting a virtual lunch and learn could be the perfect event for a limited release.
Encourage Active Participation
You need to figure out a way to get the audience’s adrenaline pumping and get people excited. For this reason, encouraging active audience participation is a good way to keep the session engaging and fun. Start by breaking down the session into multiple segments of 15-20 minutes and following each session, conduct a live poll or hold a short Q&A session to encourage active participation.
You can also set up groups of attendees and engage them in coming up with a solution to a problem or discussing the concept after a long session. This feature is frequently offered by most video conferencing and virtual event platforms.
Live Virtual Performance
A great idea to make things more engaging and fun is to lead with a brief virtual live performance that can feature an acoustic set or standup comedy aimed at entertaining the attendees as you wait for everyone to appear and get ready.
To keep things simple, you can play a Spotify “soundcheck” playlist or go with a brief TED Talk. We all know that virtual sessions tend to get tedious, but a live performance will help you set a positive tone for the rest of the session and create an incentive to make people join earlier so that the session can still start on time.
Also, Read This: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Reach Global Audience
Assemble a Team
To make the lunch and learn session more exciting and engaging, why not have two or more presenters. Regardless of what the topic is, having multiple experts sharing their tips and tricks is very helpful. Having a session moderator and proper tech support can make the virtual lunch and learn run more smoothly as the moderator will facilitate the session and take care of feedback and polls while the tech support will resolve any technical difficulties.
Share Case Studies
Audiences are most engaged when they can experience a concept through actions and examples instead of having it explained. Case studies are a great way to do this because they help summarize key learnings into memorable takeaways.
Instead of talking about a product and how it works, explain how users solved critical business problems with your solution. Case studies have shown to be particularly useful if, for instance, you’re helping your clients deploy software as they can overcome deployment barriers by learning from the success of other organizations.
Include a Short Video
Keeping your audience engaged in a virtual lunch and learn is no easy feat. You must carefully consider what you can do to grab their attention and if at some point they get distracted, think of ways to keep them interested.
A simple yet effective way is to create and use a short video about the chosen topic. It could be everything from a how-to, an explainer, and even a video snippet of an expert’s views. Videos are one of the most powerful tools in keeping attendees engaged while strengthening comprehension.
Final Words
Virtual launch and learn are a terrific way to foster connection in a safe, time-saving, and fun manner. If you’re looking to host a successful lunch and learn and engage attendees, focus on the above creative tips and you will leave them feeling like they learned something new and interesting.
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