Getting the Most Out of Your Town Hall: Strategies to Maximize Engagement
Maximizing audience engagement in a hybrid town hall space requires careful planning to ensure clear and impactful communication, optimize inclusivity and interactivity for in-person and remote participants, and maximize flexibility to accommodate a wide variety of use cases. Those are important goals because a town hall is not a small investment, and to provide the ROI you need, your all-hands space must be an environment where people and technology come together to showcase ideas powerfully and inspire action consistently.
From room-wrapping LED walls to concert hall-quality audio, AV technology plays a huge role in enabling compelling events, but just as important are your AV engagement strategies – how you use those tools and follow best practices to get the most out of your solution. This article will help illuminate a path forward – one that ensures your town hall isn’t just a high-profile amenity but a true strategic asset.
Pre-Event Training and Familiarization for Technical Staff
When technical and support staff are fully versed in the AV solutions you have provided for your town hall environment, meetings flow more smoothly, and your messaging will reach its targets more effectively.
Pre-event equipment checks, connectivity testing and backup planning help to ensure system reliability and reduce the likelihood of interruptive technical issues. Similarly, mic and camera familiarization, run-throughs for presentation switching and multimedia control, and setting up confidence monitoring will enhance speaker and moderator performance.
It’s also important to optimize audio quality and room acoustics through mic positioning and gain staging, room tuning and EQ adjusts, and training staff to adjust audio levels dynamically based on speaker volume and audience interactions. To ensure effective video and camera management, make sure that presenters and audience members are well-framed, teach staff to use auto-tracking and manual controls for PTZ cameras, and familiarize staff with live video switching procedures.
As most meetings will be hybrid events, it’s well worth the effort to train staff to manage streaming platform integration smoothly, test audio/video feeds to ensure virtual attendees can be seen and heard clearly, and assign staff to moderate online questions.
You’ll also realize gains from technical rehearsals. These run-throughs give you the opportunity to practice transitions and troubleshoot weak points, coordinate cueing and timing, and make sure that you’re locked in with your preset configurations (like keynote addresses, panel discussions and Q&A sessions) for different parts of the event.
Finally, think about the best way to manage troubleshooting and on-the-fly adjustments. You can do this with quick troubleshooting guides and short video tutorials that staffers can study in advance. Team members can also be trained in live issue management so that they can respond rapidly to audio dropouts, video freezes and network disruptions. All of this requires clear communication protocols for real-time tech coordination.
Presenter Coaching for Maximum Impact
The more confident, well-prepared and comfortable presenters are with the AV setup, the more successfully they’ll deliver their messages, connect with in-person and remote audiences, and foster meaningful interactions.
On the most basic level, make sure your presenters are familiar with the AV equipment, including mics, confidence monitors and clickers. Next, focus on confidence and delivery skills, including body language and movement as well as voice modulation and pacing. Special attention should be paid to how presenters handle audience interaction and engagement via eye contact and on-camera awareness, effective Q&A handling, and the use of polling and interactivity tools.
Presenters can also be coached on how to deliver their messages concisely and clearly, create impactful slides, and transition seamlessly between topics and speakers. This is especially important for hybrid events where presenters will need to balance in-person and remote audiences, discipline themselves to pause after asking questions to allow remote attendees to respond, and present themselves in a camera-friendly manner.
Here, again, rehearsal can be extremely helpful. Mock presentations in the actual event space with the full AV setup help to minimize surprises. Coaching on basic troubleshooting skills, like how to adjust a mic, restart a frozen slide deck, or switch inputs will boost speaker confidence, as will providing them with backup plans in case of tech failures.
Leveraging Interactive Features
The more interactive elements you work into the meeting, the more engaged your audience will be. But it’s not enough just to include things like live Q&A or audience polling. You need to handle them in a manner that promotes inclusion among in-person and remote audiences.
With live Q&A, for example, the use of a moderated Q&A platform like Slido will allow participants to submit questions in real time, upvote popular topics, and maintain focus on key ideas. Moreover, assigning a moderator to monitor virtual questions will help ensure meeting equity for in-room and remote participants. Other best practices include dedicating specific segments of the program to Q&A rather than taking random interruptions, having pre-seeded questions at the ready in case audience participation is low, and repeating spoken questions before answering them to ensure everyone understands what you’re responding to.
With regard to audience polling, start with an icebreaker, like, “Where are you joining from?” This will help warm up the audience and familiarize them with how polling will work. It’s also important to use polling in a way that truly advances transparency and discussion. Do this by asking for input on key topics that will yield decision-making insights. Likewise, tie polls into actionable takeaways. Summarize polling results and connect them to company decisions on next steps. For example, if you poll your audience on the challenges of hybrid work, be sure to follow up with a discussion, either in the moment or in a breakout session. Finally, don’t shy away from a little gamification. Whether you inject some trivia questions into the mix or offer small incentives for participation (like shoutouts or prizes), light-hearted elements like this will help to keep energy levels high.
If your meeting will include breakout rooms (virtual or otherwise), it’s smart to define clear objectives for each room and to assign a moderator or facilitator to keep conversations on track. To ensure meaningful discussion, limit breakout rooms to 5-8 participants. You may also want to have each group nominate a spokesperson to share key takeaways afterward. Think, too, about how the groups will be composed. By mixing departments and leadership levels, you’ll get more diverse perspectives. Finally, consider incorporating digital collaboration tools like Miro, MURAL or Google Jamboard for brainstorming sessions.
Post-Event Support and Maintenance
To ensure continuous improvements, minimize technical issues and enhance the overall attendee experience, develop a plan for post-event AV support and maintenance.
First, conduct a post-event system review to analyze performance and identify issues and gather feedback from the AV team. Be sure to review recorded footage and audio playback, note technical difficulties, evaluate camera angles, document any technical adjustments that should be made before the next event, and log equipment failures or potential upgrades that may be need. You’ll also want to perform post-event AV equipment checks, document equipment issues, and schedule next steps to address them.
It’s important as well to focus specifically on issues surrounding hybrid meeting capabilities. Ask, “How can we enhance video and audio setup for remote participants? How can we optimize live streaming and recording quality?” From adjusting camera framing and lighting to reviewing video and audio recordings for clarity and accessibility, post-meeting actions help to ensure next-meeting success. And how best to do that? Create a standard AV runbook that documents best practices and technical settings that worked well. Train AV staff for future events and schedule regular system tests and upgrades, including mock meetings to ensure your AV system is ready well in advance of the next meeting.
Gathering and Analyzing Participant Feedback
It’s hard to overstate the important of gleaning insights from participants about the town hall meeting experience. Audience members and presenters can help identify strengths, identify areas for improvement, and ensure your all-hands meeting format evolves based on attendee needs.
Collecting feedback from multiple sources will be helpful. You can even do this during the event by using live polling and monitoring chat activity and Q&A engagement. Afterward, send out a survey to presenters and attendees. Also consider conducting focus groups and/or one-on-one interviews for debriefing purposes. And if possible, analyze engagement metrics like attendance and drop-off rates, chat & poll participation, and Q&A volume and response time.
Once you’ve gathered feedback, analyze it to identify key themes. Look for patterns in feedback, compare feedback over multiple events, and prioritize actionable improvements. What do we mean by “prioritize?” Address key feedback in the next meeting, enhance engagement strategies based on feedback, refine your AV and technical execution, and continue iterating and testing new approaches.
Make It a Mission to Boost Engagement from One Town Hall Meeting to the Next.
Every town hall meeting you hold will yield a raft of data for continuous improvement. The key is to gather your insights as thoroughly as possible, in as timely a manner as you can, and then to implement them where relevant. From pre-event training to post-event planning, opportunities abound for continual improvement in participant engagement. If you take advantage of them, ROI for each meeting will be higher than that it was for the event that preceded it.
