How to Hold a Virtual Town Hall Meeting?

Town Hall meetings are a frequent procedure in various companies. With the global pandemic and restrictions on traveling, companies entered the enterprise solution to continue holding virtual meetings, town halls, summits, or conferences to discuss common objectives, share insights, and learn new things.

Planning to hold a successful virtual town hall meeting? Let us talk you through some vital practices required to organize a town hall meeting.

Step 1: Pre-planning Considerations

An online town hall meeting can require a vital part of the workday therefore, it is important to ensure that your virtual town hall runs smoothly without any interruption. Pre-planning considerations include the following drives.

Get the Headcount: Try to obtain the exact number of participants who’ll be visiting the meeting. It will let you frame the agenda and team-building sessions subsequently.

Leverage the Right Event Technology: It is important to choose the right virtual meeting platform to elevate the level of your online town hall meetings. Define your event and business goals and reasonably decide the features and innovations you want to keep to ensure the success of your townhalls.

Be Careful of Different Time Zones: If your company has a distributed team working across multiple countries, choose a time that resonated with everyone.

Form a Team: Choose tech personnel, a moderator, or an MC for the smooth running of the session. The moderator helps queue in attendee questions and promote the session. The IT team will assure that all your attendee can engage without any interruptions.

Choose the Date and Time Wisely: To draw more people towards your virtual town halls, wisely select the date and time of your event. Make sure that your virtual town hall meeting does not collide with any other significant events. Avoid national holidays, weekends, Christmas, or New Year time to eliminate attendee drop-off.

Step 2: Define Meeting Objectives

Each town hall meeting needs to have a primary objective. This objective describes the goal of the town hall meeting.

Have you lately announced any new product or its relevant features?
What are the updates regarding monthly or quarterly sales?
Is the business going through a swivel?
Do you want to discuss a shared objective or share insights?

The objective allows you to prepare the meeting Agenda, presentation, and the speakers of the event. For instance, if the organization has decided to shift its strategic course, the CEO might be the most suitable person to take the lead. Similarly, sales updates should be updated by the best sales executives.

Besides these definite goals, you can also concentrate on “softer” objectives like inspiring employees and reinforcing organizational culture.

Step 3: Decide the Meeting Agenda

Once you are clear with your meeting objectives, pen down the topics that need to be discussed during the town hall meeting. Also, it’s always necessary to have the leaders’ and managers’ suggestions on fundamental concerns. It always proves to be an essential tool in conducting even better and successful virtual town halls.

Prepare a list of the sequence of sessions and their duration you wish to keep for your online town hall meeting. The sessions include icebreaker activity, Q&As, monthly celebrations, updates on sales, new objectives, and more.

Step 4: Make Your Online Townhall Meeting More Engaging

Make crisp presentations and keep them to the point. Focus on the recent updates, accomplishments, or sales opportunities. To deliver the content appropriately, get incredible speakers or department heads onboard. Experienced and skillful speakers know the art of keeping the attendees engaged during a session. Use lively images, audio, graphics, and videos to make your virtual event even more engaging and interesting.

Step 5: Keep Your Attendees Hooked

We understand that diversions are just one click away for the online audience. Therefore, it is vital to add exciting elements to your event or meeting to make it more interesting.
Add features like live polls, surveys, Q&A sessions, live chat, and many more to promote active participation and 2-way communication.
You can also include features like photo booths or a social wall where the attendees can capture multiple photos or pen down their fond memories respectively. These features help replicate the experiences of a physical town hall meeting.

It’s advisable to look for an ideal virtual meeting platform that has a customizable interface and engaging features. Customization allows you to create an attractive 3D virtual stage to offer immersive and memorable experiences to your attendees.

Step 6: Send Meeting Invitations

Let your attendees know about the online town hall meeting through a calendar invitation, email, or a messaging app such as Microsoft Teams.

The invitations you send should include the following;

Agenda: The Meeting Agenda should answer inquiries such as the date and time, town hall objectives, who will be the speakers, team building activities, session line-up, etc.

Meeting Guidelines: Online town halls can get disorganized and challenging to control as the number of participants increases. Hence, this is why it is vital to set definite ground rules right from the beginning like introducing yourself before speaking, muting the mic while others are speaking, use the raised hands feature for asking any question.
FAQs: This segment should answer questions like how to enter the meeting, use the meeting platform, troubleshoot simple technical errors, how to use technical support features, and so on.

Step 7: Welcome Questions in Advance

Ask your attendees to send their questions beforehand. The speaker ideally includes these questions during the session to make the Q&A session more interactive.

Step 8: Perform a Dry-run

A test rehearsal or dry run is important to ensure the smooth running of your virtual event on D-day. Make sure to do multiple system checks, test the Internet connection, meeting software, and examine the device compatibility, chat app to avoid any unforeseen error.

The Bottom Line

We hope the above-mentioned steps will help you plan even better and unique virtual town hall meetings. All you need is, to begin with, a strategic approach and select an ideal virtual event partner to elevate the level of your events. Make sure to include exciting and novel features that can recreate the environment and experiences of a physical meeting.