A checklist for hosting a successful online virtual meeting

It’s no secret that meetings are an integral part of an organization and yet stats show that executives believe more than 67% of meetings are a complete failure. Moreover, a significant percentage of the workers admitted they multitask in meetings.

As if the above-mentioned stats were not horrifying enough, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it even more difficult to hold effective meetings. Businesses are now forced to hold online virtual meetings and holding an effective meeting has now become a real challenge!

Luckily, there are some things your business can do to ensure the effectiveness of a meeting and this blog provides a brief checklist to keep in mind in order to ensure the effectiveness of meetings. So, let’s get started!

4 things to keep in mind for hosting a successful online virtual meeting

1. Choosing the right platform is the key

When you are looking to host a virtual meeting, you need to select the right platform that can provide you with all the essential things to smoothly run the meeting and achieve all of your goals. Here are some of the things that you should look at while searching for the right platform:

• Find a platform that can easily and smoothly register your attendees in the meeting.
• Look for the platform that provides the attendees with an opportunity to engage with each other.
• Ensure the platform allows you to make more personalized meetings and gives you customizations options as well.
• Find a platform that is easy to use and has an aesthetically pleasing design

SCOOCS is an online events platform that helps users host successful online virtual events with its easy-to-use functionality. SCOOCS offers many features such as registration of all participants in minutes with an excel file, customization option to make personalized virtual meetings, Chatbox, 1-1 video meeting, etc which makes it the perfect tool to host an online virtual meeting.

2. Make a clear agenda for an effective meeting

This may come as a surprise but most business meetings don’t have a clear agenda. In fact, research shows that only 37% of meetings in the US use agendas while the remaining percentage of meetings just go with the flow.

To make an agenda for a successful meeting, you need to follow these basic rules:

• Make an agenda that gets the business done, exchange ideas, and make decisions.
• When you are making an agenda for the meeting, make sure you are specifying the format for each topic, for instance, “Q&A,” “Poll Attendees,” etc.
• Allocate a more realistic time to every topic, so you do not mess up the meeting schedule.
• Identify that who is the person responsible for leading a particular topic (Assign Roles to everyone).
• Make the first agenda of yours to review the agenda and make changes if necessary.

3. Get everyone involved

When hosting a virtual event, make sure you are getting everyone involved in the meeting so that you can achieve the goal. Some of the best ways to involve every participant is to hold online Q&A sessions, polls, organize online gamification, and an online discussion with topics relevant to the attendees’ interests.

Besides these traditional ways, you can also share articles, videos, Gifs with the participants to get them more involved in the discussion.

4. Take feedback before you end the meeting

The best way to end your online virtual meeting is to organize an online survey to collect the participants’ feedback. The survey should be short and must include questions like what was the attendees’ experience, what worked well, what should be done to improve the event, etc.

After you get the result of the survey, analyze it and see where you did well and what are the areas you need to work on in your next virtual event.

Wrapping it up

Many of the online surveys show that companies do not want these online virtual meetings to end even after the COVID-19 pandemic . This suggests that virtual events are not going away anytime soon, and businesses will have to embrace them. If you are looking for the right platform to host your online virtual meetings, check here for everything SCOOCS can do for you!