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Build your knowledge and confidence to play the technical support role of the producer in virtual events – 2.5 hours, online

Who this course is for

This course is intended for anyone who is experiencing the growing demand for effective online meetings, and who wishes to develop their skills for the technical support role of the producer in virtual events.

Anyone who is leading virtual meetings, virtual training, or webinars – or supporting others to do so – whether in the private, public or voluntary sector.

What you will gain

By the end of this 2.5 hours you will have

• Considered the information which should be provided in pre-event briefings
• Understood the importance of a script
• Developed a repertoire of troubleshooting tips and practices including renaming
• Experienced and discussed breakout rooms from a participant and producer point of view, and finessed the way in which you set them up
• Considered ways of briefing tasks and downloading responses, especially in relation to breakouts

Learning style

For a couple of hours, we’re going to focus on the role of a producer in delivering great virtual events. You may already be performing the role, you may deeply appreciate the value of it but not tried it out yet, or, like many students on our virtual facilitation courses, you’re not sure where to start in developing producing skills in yourself and others.

This brief session allows us to consider some of the producing tasks in more detail, focusing on Zoom but considering more general implications for producing on other platforms. In particular, we’ll look at how to create and manage complex breakout sessions, using real case studies as an example.

This session will enable you to build your confidence, and explore what can go wrong and how to either fix it or minimise the disruption.

We will first of all demo a straightforward breakout exercise.

We will then make you all co-hosts and play Breakout Tag so that you can practice moving smoothly between breakouts as a producer, troubleshooter or floor walker

We will then walk through the host perspective on breakouts, step by step, to explain some of the decisions and options available

Other producing challenges we will explore:.

• How to provide basic technical support to participants, before and during the meeting, including basic adaptations to optimise bandwidth and stability
• ‘Tweaks’ which can be made to the event design to make the producer’s role easier and to ‘de-risk’ the event
• Key features of the Zoom dashboard which have producer implications
• Distributing the producer role across a team during a large event.
• Screen sharing

Assumptions and Requirements

• Participants should have a basic competence as participants in Zoom
• The language of delivery will be English
• Each participant will be requested to have their own headset with integrated microphone, or earbuds with microphone
• Each participant will be requested to join via a laptop/desktop rather than a tablet or phone

Your trainers

For this online course I am pleased to be working in partnership with a wide team of trainers, many of whom were involved in the design of this session originally and who bring extensive online knowledge and experience – view our profiles.  At least two of us will be involved in the delivery of every session.

See also about me, how I work and recommendations & case studies, and please contact me about how we might work together.