How to Run Awesome, Large Virtual Meetings

Now that so many of us are doing remote meetings and may be for the foreseeable future, I wanted to share some tips I learned while working at Change.org with an amazing team that was distributed across 18 countries. While a virtual 1:1 or small group meeting is relatively straightforward, navigating large meetings online can be challenging. We found these processes to be very helpful at Change, where nearly all of our large meetings were done virtually across many locations.

You may already be doing many of these things, but in case you are not, here are the tips I learned about how to make virtual large meetings go well:

1. Always Use Video + Chat: Have everyone in a chat room alongside a video call. This could be Slack+Zoom or the built in chat in Zoom or Hangouts, etc. Even for people who are on the phone only, unless they are in transit, if they can have access to chat on their phone that's preferable.
2. Assign a Chat Monitor: Assign someone, other than the meeting owner, to be responsible for monitoring the chat and highlighting for the current speaker when things in the chat need attention.
3. Use Chat for Simple Questions: Basic questions about the current topic or slide can be typed into the chat and answered by the current speaker without needing to interrupt the flow or divert to questions that change the topic. 
4. Use Virtual "Hand-Raising" for Longer Questions: For more complex questions, comments or topic changes, give people a virtual way to raise their hand via chat. At Change we used the word "stack," which people would type to signal they wanted to say something. The person monitoring the chat would keep track of the order of the stacks and when it was time for questions, they would call on people in the order of their stacks, avoiding the messiness of people trying to speak at the same time over video. (Our engineers even built tools in Slack for us to manage the stack queue, like typing "stack show," which would produce a list of people's names in order.
5. Virtually Cheer on Your Colleagues: Supportive comments (emoji, gifs, etc.) can also be made via chat, giving meetings more energy, even virtually, while people are talking, without interrupting or distracting them.
6. Use Shared Docs for Collaboration: For collaborating during meetings, we would use a shared Google doc and start with a set of prompts or questions. Rather than jump straight into discussion, we'd give people time to both write their own thoughts and answers as well as +1 other people's thoughts. People would use their name or initials to show which comments came from which person. The person leading the meeting would then guide the conversation asking people to give more detail on what was written, rather than having a completely open-ended conversation, which is difficult to do virtually with large groups, especially where not everyone speaks the same first language. Note that this technique also works well when you have a lot of introverts in the room who need time to think before they talk.
7. Make Room for Fun. Things like dressing the same (plaid, Hawaiian, even pajamas!), bringing a favorite snack or beverage, inviting pets or kids to join, or turning on some music and typing some things you appreciate about each other can bring the humanity back to virtual meetings and help you enjoy the time you are spending together... apart.

Hope these suggestions are helpful as we all navigate life with far more virtual meetings. What other tips do you have that have helped you lead large, online meetings? Leave your thoughts in the comments.