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Unfortunately, sometimes a lack of proper planning or understanding of the best ways to make a townhall engaging and effective, can lead to many feeling uninspired by their company all hands meetings .
Vevox allows you to level up your town halls, and this article will outline the 6 steps that will help you achieve success in townhall meetings using Vevox’s live polling, anoymous Q&A and more.
Lewis Thompson, an event technology specialist in our customer success team who has years of experience managing the interactive technology for many large corporate business’ townhalls, ran a webinar (shown above) that highlighted how you can implement these six key steps and thoroughly detailed the ways you can run a successful townhall. This blog will highlight the most essential elements however you can also watch the webinar in full.
1. Pre-Meeting Invitation
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Long before the townhall is scheduled to begin, it’s vitally important to send out clear pre-meeting invitations, to make people aware of when and where the townhall is happening, in addition to building anticipation and excitement for the meeting.
What’s more, this will allow your participants to ask questions in advance of the session. This is a fantastic feature, as you may have some people who can’t make the session but allowing them to pose questions in the Q&A feature before the townhall means they’ll still be involved and have their voices heard. As a result, this boosts engagement.
Also, by having these questions in the Q&A in advance of the session, it gives the speaker or member of leadership within your business ample time to prepare answers to the questions, meaning everybody’s question will be responded to with well thought out answers.
2. Meeting facilitator & Q&A moderator
These two roles are both equally as important, and crucial to ensuring your townhall meeting is effective, engaging and runs smoothly. The meeting facilitator acts as the middleman between leadership and the audience. This needs to be a confident, energetic person as they’ll be communicating with the leadership and queuing questions within Vevox for leadership to answer.
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The Q&A moderator is the person that’ll be pushing the questions live during the townhall, ensuring all questions are on topic and relevant to minimize any conversation that’s not useful to those attending the session.
To ensure success as a meeting facilitator or a Q&A moderator, ensure you’ve had a practice run with some mock questions, so the people in these roles are confident in the tasks they’ll be needing to do.
3. Icebreaker Poll
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Running a quick, easy icebreaker poll is a fantastic way to get your audience connected and participating in the meeting straight from the off. This will give your audience a sense of togetherness and before you’ve even started the main bulk of your town hall – the audience is already engaged and knows how it all works.
4. Polls for important updates
When discussing any important business updates or key decisions during a townhall, it’s recommended that you should use a live poll to understand the views and opinions of everyone across the whole business – as it’s likely these bigger updates will affect lots of people.
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What’s more, through using these live polls knowledge retention goes up massively and people will feel empowered to engage and let their feelings be known. From this, as a business it becomes much easier to understand whether updates,big decisions or changes are received positively or negatively across the organization. As a result, you’ll be much more likely to understand your workforce and hone in on what’s working and what’s not.
5. Use ‘Present View’
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Attendees are much more likely to participate and engage with the session if you use present view in Vevox throughout your townhall. In fact, those attending the townhall will be twice as likely to get involved in the Q&A if they can see the questions on the screen whether attending remotely or in-person. This allows participants to feel more immersed within the meeting.
6. Anonymous Feedback Survey
An evaluation survey gathered from your attendees at the end of the townhall will allow you to understand what could be changed or improved at the next townhall to make it more engaging, and the employees will feel that they are empowered to give their views with a genuine chance that these views will lead to changes. It’s really important to show that leadership genuinely care and want to listen and learn from employee feedback, and an anonymous feedback survey allows this to happen.
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Ensuring your meeting facilitator communicates the survey across to your participants at the end of the townhall will provide the best response rates.
Townhall Success
So, through following and implementing these six steps you will be well on your way to running a super successful townhall meeting! You will have ensured that employees are engaged throughout the meeting, business updates are well acknowledged and retained, and the most liked questions will be answered in detail. Also, you’ll be able to gather meaningful data and of course – run a hybrid meeting that is fun and inclusive for all!
Further reading
- Townhall meetings & AMAs with Vevox
- Read our eBook on hybrid meetings
- 9 reasons you NEED a polling app in your virtual meetings
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