Creating a safe online space for large groups can be challenging, but also rewarding. Facilitating online sessions requires some skills and strategies that differ from face-to-face settings. In this article, you will learn some tips and best practices to foster a positive, respectful, and inclusive online environment for large groups of participants.
Before you start your online session, make sure you have a clear and specific purpose for your group. What are the goals and outcomes of the session? How will you measure the success and impact of the session? Communicate the purpose to your participants and invite them to share their expectations and questions. Also, establish some ground rules or norms for the online session. These can include how to use the chat, microphone, and camera, how to respect different opinions and perspectives, how to ask for help or clarification, and how to deal with technical issues. You can co-create the norms with your participants or ask them to agree on them at the beginning of the session.
Taking the time to build a strong foundation for a group will *always* have a positive ROI. Many ineffective meetings skip this step to get right to the content of a session, but clarity and norm-setting is key. Sharing a clear result for the session (why is each person there?) and then sharing or co-creating Community Agreements is crucial. Community Agreements (or norms) should go beyond surface level, be co-created, and if the group meets in an ongoing fashion, should be revisited and updated periodically.
One of the challenges of facilitating online sessions for large groups is to keep them engaged and attentive. You can use various tools and platforms to make your session more interactive and fun. For example, you can use polls, quizzes, surveys, games, breakout rooms, whiteboards, or shared documents to stimulate discussion, feedback, collaboration, and creativity. You can also use multimedia elements such as videos, images, audio, or animations to enhance your presentation and capture the interest of your participants. However, be careful not to overload your session with too many tools or activities, as this can cause confusion or frustration. Choose the tools that suit your purpose, audience, and content, and test them before the session.
If you're planning meetings effectively, you will never have participants attend expecting to sit back. Engagement is critical to moving work forward, so keeping your results front and center when you plan is important. Every activity should be purposeful, and less is often more and will elicit the best quality engagement and work. Using a mix of engagement exercises that allow for individual work (such as a check-in or journaling prompt) and group work (such as breakouts with a worksheet, or a collaborative board for idea generation) will ensure more inclusion.
Another way to create a safe online space for large groups is to check in and check out with your participants. Checking in means asking your participants how they are feeling, what they hope to learn, or what they are curious about at the start of the session. Checking out means asking your participants what they learned, what they enjoyed, or what they need more support with at the end of the session. Checking in and checking out can help you build rapport, trust, and empathy with your participants, as well as assess their needs, interests, and satisfaction. You can use different methods to check in and check out, such as asking open-ended questions, using emojis, using scales, or using word clouds.
I will advocate for checking in and out all day long. Check-ins are NOT icebreakers. The goal of a check-in is to connect participants to each other and to the result of the WORK. Providing a check-in question that is not related to the work or does not lead to better results will likely disengage some of your audience. A check-out can be used to gauge whether you've met your results, how you can improve for the next engagement, and what you might need for follow-up. In my experience, it's important not to skim over these important bookends to any meeting.
Creating a safe online space for large groups also means respecting and celebrating the diversity and inclusion of your participants. Diversity refers to the differences among your participants in terms of their backgrounds, identities, experiences, perspectives, and preferences. Inclusion refers to the sense of belonging and value that your participants feel in the online space. You can encourage diversity and inclusion by acknowledging and appreciating the contributions of your participants, using inclusive language and visuals, inviting feedback and suggestions, addressing conflicts or misunderstandings, and providing accessible and adaptable options for your participants.
Conducting a Composition Analysis prior to any meeting or event can help to ensure you have diversity within the group, and it's important to consider all aspects of a person's identity. The Composition Analysis can help you see which perspectives you need that are not represented, and being intentional about this means that you will have plenty of time to build relationships and invite a diverse group of folks to the table.
Finally, creating a safe online space for large groups requires you to monitor and adapt your facilitation style and strategies throughout the session. Monitoring means observing and listening to your participants, as well as collecting and analyzing data and feedback. Adapting means adjusting and modifying your plan, content, pace, tone, and tools based on the needs, reactions, and responses of your participants. You can monitor and adapt by using verbal and non-verbal cues, asking for confirmation and clarification, using polls and surveys, soliciting feedback and testimonials, and reflecting and evaluating your session.
In my opinion, this is the crucial thing in order to create safe group communication spaces online. You have to be very fair and strict when it comes to active moderation and enforcing the rules that were set up. Inappropriate language has to be publicly called out and sanctioned, so what remains is positive and encouraging atmosphere where everyone feels included as long as they're not hurting others, accidentally or on purpose.