At the end of last year, I wrote about “Zoom fatigue” and how the problem was that often hosts don’t design their events to be high engagement events.

We’ve all sat through those painful one-directional video calls where you passively observe a discussion or presentation and are provided very little opportunity to engage. This works great for blasting out a message to lots of people but is a really bad practice when trying to help people connect and make a meaningful contribution in a workshop or training session.

High engagement events on the other hand enable people to connect in small groups, share their individual perspectives and exert a level of autonomy allowing them to get the most out of any session, even if it’s digital.

With a few simple controls, it's easy to set up an environment that enables people to own their own engagement ensuring they contribute as much as possible.

In this post, I’ll outline how you can easily do this with Berst.

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Events in Berst

Berst events are easy to set up and even easier to run. The creation and management of rooms are streamlined to reduce the amount of time spent setting up an event. Because of how easy it is to setup rooms, events can be set up before or during an event. This helps free up organisers and facilitators to concentrate on maximising the engagement of their participants instead of on the technology.

Berst gives you the option of bulk updating rooms via the manage rooms screen or adding them one at a time via the main screen.

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Creating small connect groups

Once you’ve set up your rooms, the next challenge is to ensure participants connect in small groups generating higher levels of engagement. Small groups provide more opportunity to be heard, increasing the likelihood participants will actively engage.

With Berst you can set participant limits via the manage rooms screen.

Allowing the sharing of individual perspectives

Now that you have created small groups, it is important to help participants feel like they have been heard, and that their opinions matter. The use of digital whiteboards or other cloud-based tools helps visualise discussions assisting with sense-making and alignment building.

VideoFacilitator makes it possible to connect any cloud-based tool to a room. Links can be added in bulk from the manage rooms screen or one room at a time from within the room. The ability to connect a link to a room contextually connects content to specific rooms, make it obvious for participants to know what each room is collaborating on.

Because links can be opened from anywhere, facilitators can easily check on the work of different rooms to get a sense of which groups may require assistance.

Enabling self-direction

Now that you have created small groups with connected content, giving participants the ability to easily move themselves during the event shifts the responsibility of having to know people want to engage with, onto the participants instead. This removes the need to predict what attendees are interested in and allows you to just create the space instead and then ask participants to generate topics that concern them or to find groups discussing the topics that are of most interest to them.

VideoFacilitator also allows you to customise the level of controls that participants have enabling you to create the right level of control that fuels and enables an exciting event to emerge.

Facilitation controls are easily accessible from the facilitation controls panel, while it is possible to customise the controls available from the administration panel.

Summary

Berst was built by facilitators for facilitators so is designed to enable nuanced mechanics that support high engagement events.

The simplicity of the controls take much of the fear away and helps you focus on facilitating the event, instead of managing the tech.

If you are interested to give it a try, check out our website and follow our journey!

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