What's the Future of Settlement Work? This week a focus on virtual/online facilitation

Online/virtual facilitation is something I hear a lot of people struggling with. They want to know how to make things more engaging. Why their online group participants aren't participating as much. What they can do differently.

I've been answering that question in my sessions, and trying to model how you can create engagement, when it has worked for me. I've also been learning from others.

The thing is, it takes time and resources to create a seamless, engaging, and effective online workshop. But it can be done.

But it also means taking time and resources to learn to become better at this.

Why it matters

Too often folks are simply presenting PowerPoint slides and then having a Q&A at the end. It typically doesn’t work in person, but it certainly doesn’t work online if you’re trying to keep an audience engaged.

What you can do

Learn from others.

It's that simple. You don't have to start from scratch. People have been doing this since before the pandemic. But we certainly learned a lot and upskilled during the pandemic. The upside is that many people share what they have learned.

Jennifer Chan – moving a design lab online when a pandemic closes your organization’s door

In this interview, immediately after we all shifted to remote/digital work at the beginning of the pandemic, Jennifer Chan talked about how she quickly decided to move an upcoming design lab online with her team of facilitators and twenty youth researchers. Even though she is a seasoned facilitator and very technically literate, there were challenges to overcome. Listen as she describes:

• how she made the decision
• what it was like at her agency during a time of decision chaos as they worked to ensure their community could continue to be served
• How her shift online rolled out, including the technology choices she made and how her team had to pivot as they were working together online
• How group dynamics shifted from the first meeting to the second
• Key things Jennifer recommends you think about when doing online work

What she learned and shares is completely relevant to our experiences today. She was also kind enough to share some of her templates

You can make your online sessions better, here’s how

Last week I took a deep dive and learned one approach to designing effective and interactive workshops. It worked for me. It can work for you. It was a really great workshop last week that I’ve been meaning to take for some time, but the timing never really worked. It was the Session Design Lab by Dirk Slater of Fabriders. We did a “deep dive into adult learning and review research that led to a session format known as ADIDS (Activity, Discussion, Input, Deepening and Synthesis).”

There are so many models and approaches to crafting an interactive and engaging workshop or learning session. And one of the things I hear a lot from folks in the sector is that they get the technology and how to use it (although I would always suggest there is more to learn), but where they struggle are with the facilitation and engagement pieces.

Models like ADIDS provide a great template and canvas approach to plan out a session with reminders about engagement. But also about how much prep you can and should do with folks before the session. I also learned, through his modelling, how to effectively facilitate a small group session among participants who are strangers before the session.

Some more resources

I would strongly suggest checking out this online group/mailing list of online facilitators sharing tips and best practices – Facilitators for Pandemic Response: “This group is a place for those who facilitate online (or need to) can learn, share and make offers to the world as the Covid19 virus plays out. We welcome (online) facilitators, organizers, technology stewards (people who can straddle between communities and technologies and help people make and implement tech choices and other interested people. We welcome offers, asks, experiments and sharing.”

You can view and search the messages without joining. If you do join, it’s pretty high volume, or has been over the past few months, so you’ll want to filter the messages into a folder to avoide inbox chaos! But, super rich sharing and insights here. Really the essence of the promise of the internet – insightful and open sharing and learning among peers.

The group facilitator/owner, Nancy White (who is awesome and shares so much great stuff on her site) has also created an Online Meeting Resources Toolkit for Facilitators During Coronavirus Pandemic, which I think continues to be updated. You should definitely read it.

Seasoned facilitator Beth Kanter shared How To Facilitate Effective Virtual Meetings early on in the pandemic. Her tips stand up 3 years later: “It’s time to up your virtual facilitation and convening skills. I’ve been working remotely since the early 1990s, during the early years of the Web. My first remote job was to work with a virtual team to manage an online network for artists, called Artswire. Since those days, I have continued to hone my virtual facilitation skills to design and deliver effective virtual meetings and trainings. As nonprofits are impacted by the CoronaVirus and need more virtual meeting skills, I’d like to share what I have learned.”

Some other stuff

Strengthening High-Quality, Inclusive & Innovative Hybrid Service Delivery - session notes and resources

What works well in a digital/hybrid model? What works better in person??In this Feb 7th, 2023 session I brought a group of folks together to talk about resources, experiences, and insights in the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector. This is a conversation that isn’t happening at scale in the Immigrant and Refugee-serving sector. And it needs to. It also needs to involve frontline workers, middle management, and not just the usual suspects from sector leadership, EDs, and heads of sector umbrella groups. There is much wisdom in the room, huge amounts of experience. The goal of the session was to kick start a conversation that will continue and build and impact how we look at where we are and how we can build hybrid services for the future.

This session focused on discussing hybrid service delivery - how you serve Newcomers in both an in-person/digital approach. It did not focused on organizational hybrid work models and structures - how you structure your work (eg. 2 days in office, 3 days at home, etc.). These are interrelated, yes, but they are different conversations. As part of the session notes here I will share some high level resources, post-session, on hybrid work models and structures, but we didn’t focus on this in our session.

We worked together to answer these questions:

• What works well in a digital/hybrid model?
• What works better in person?
• What do you need to make a hybrid service model work?
• What do your clients need? How can you support them to access hybrid services that include remote/virtual components?
• What projects or efforts are you working on at your organization focused on digital or hybrid service delivery?