First aid version/quick fixes/low hanging fruits

Here are a few key steps we suggest when you consider moving your programs online. 

Phases & core outcomes – Clarify purpose

First steps in translating your programs online should be to first return to your initial planning process where you defined the key outcomes, goals and definitions of success for your program. This process will allow you to basic infrastructure of your process and from this place, see what parts are translatable and what parts are not. It is natural at first, to consider that the program you had envisioned cannot be translated, but please be encouraged that there are now many tools and creative online platforms that allow for a highly participative experience online. So at this point, a level of openness and curiosity is encouraged. 

Stakeholder mapping

Once you have broken down the program into phases and identified the adaptations needed, creating a stakeholder engagement strategy is key. As with many in person events or programs, a lot of prior engagement is already done virtually, but the difference with running it all virtual, is you need to consider varying factors in regards to the operational side of the process. First, on what scale are we talking, five-hundred conference participants, or an interactive workshop of five? What demographic of participants are you looking to engage with, meaning what time zones need considering, or broadband limitations? And, how are you going to design your program to meet the needs of these participants, so as their time has been well invested through attendance?

Virtual design your program journey 

Once you have re-clarified the core purpose and objectives of your program, mapped your key stakeholders along with its scale and demographic, you can now start to think about what parts can realistically be translated to an online setting. You may be pleasantly surprised! 

A helpful technique with any process, especially for a virtual one, is to imagine your whole program experience like a journey. A journey with lots of different twists and turns, stops and starts, a beginning and an end. At each part of the journey, your participants will experience different feelings, pick up new knowledge, make new connections, learn on different levels and if the journey has been a success, come out of it the other end richer than when they came in. From this perspective, it is encouraged to break down your original program into different parts, or phases and for each phase think about your core objectives of what you want your participants to leave with and how. It is also during this process that you can start to explore creative options for translating these phases to a virtual setting. Here are some examples of what your program phases might look like and some ideas for shifting them online:

Preparation phase:

• Invitation & communication: Already predominantly online, however, when in transferring to a fully virtual setting, it is important at each part of the journey to think of how you can create more human interaction that makes people feel connected to themselves, each other and to the program content. Creative ways such as adding personal videos, poems, art, inspiring films can give more of a personal touch to your invitations & communication. Think, what can I add that will make this person smile/reflect/connect?
• Community/team/participant introductions: Building a strong sense of team and community in your program is key both on or offline. For the virtual setting, it is essential that you give this enough attention, as probably the largest factor lost from moving completely to virtual, is that of all the small informal, unstructured interpersonal connections that people share during in person programs and events. Therefore designing in plenty of opportunities for these types of interactions are key, even if they have to be a little more structured, but let’s think of them as virtual coffee dates!
  
  • Examples could include: One on one team matchmaking virtual coffee intros. We suggest thirty minutes, using one of the many video conferencing tools. You may want to provide a few prompting questions, icebreakers, or leave it open depending on the nature of your program and participants.
    
  • Have all your participants send a 1 minute video of themselves somewhere that brings them joy. And have them introduce themselves and talk about something that they love/that inspires them/their core values/a funny story etc. Then compile these videos as a community archive that can be shared amongst the group.
• Speaker/facilitators/trainers/hosts introductions: Similarly to that of building the community amongst participants, it’s important that you introduce and build a strong rapport from the beginning with the program team. Whether these are facilitators, trainers, speakers, or externals, it is a good way of building excitement for what the team will be delivering in an online setting. Maybe have a short film of an interactive workshop using one of the many online tools such as Mural that allow participants to interact directly with a collective board. This could also be a good way of building technical capabilities in your participant group and showcase some of the ‘program pieces’ they can expect.
• Building virtual capacity: For the team Doing a dry run. Practice the technology and the new virtual roles. Highlight any knowledge gaps in your team and invest into filling those. Even if you are a wonderful facilitator in the physical space this doesn’t make you a great virtual facilitator. It is crucial to invest in this skill-set to ensure the participants will have a smooth and meaningful experience in your online program.
  • For the participants: An essential piece of the preparation phase in translating your programs online, is to support your participants in building the appropriate capabilities in order to fully participate and engage with the process. As mentioned in the stakeholder mapping section, it is key that you have a sense of who your participants are regarding their technological capabilities, internet access and technological literacy. What we mean by this is, how well do they know how to navigate your chosen virtual platforms and tools? And to what level? It is important to look at the different levels you have present in your participant group and think through what support they will need to have, to get onto the same level, in order to participate at the same rate. This is essential, as not having the technological capabilities can deter many people from turning up authentically into a process and can create a sense of exclusion. You may want to think through:

• • • Sending training materials for your virtual conference platform. There are many videos available online that will help people build their capacity and comfort with the platforms. For example, if using Zoom, you can access in depth training via their website through multiple guides & videos. 
    • If using an additional platform, such as Mural, for creative participation, it is encouraged to provide some form of ‘pre-event’ engagement with the platform. Of course this will depend on the nature of your program, in that you can also have facilitators who will be responsible for this role, but in a more ‘open’ form of process, having your participants explore the platform individually, will help them feel more comfortable in stepping in. 

It is important to take a beginners mindset for this piece of the process. There are new platforms being built everyday, so for many of us, this mindset is very much a reality. But even with the most ‘basic’ or common platforms, it is important not to assume knowledge. 

Delivery Phase:

• Program launch &  journey map: The launch of any program is always a moment of anticipation and excitement. When translating it online, it is key to think creatively in how to harness this energy for your participants. How do they feel truly part of something? How do they feel connected to the program and to their fellow participants? An important piece here is how you host the virtual space. And what we mean by this, is the energy of the facilitating team, has a massive impact on the energy of the participants.
  • Greet people as they arrive. Be a good host by supporting your participants to feel comfortable in arriving into the space. Just like you would in a physical room, you may want to play music, introduce people, welcome people by name, ask people to change their names to include where they are from etc. 
  • Depending on the nature of your program, the ‘feel’ that you want to create is key. For example, if your program is about innovation and creativity, you may want to facilitate in a way that communicates these core elements. People often respond to the energy of their facilitator, which can then in turn determine the energy of their participation. If you want your participants to think creatively, invite this energy! This is  especially important in a virtual setting where people will often be physically on their own.
  • Using visuals can also help to ‘anchor’ the participants into the process. Creating a ‘journey map’ that can act as an extended program agenda, can also help to create a sense of excitement and solidarity in that they are part of this bigger process. This also can help in ensuring extended participation, by showing that there are things to be accomplished if we want to reach our collective destination.
    
• Program management implementation (feedback sessions): How to manage our programs online is key. Ensuring ongoing engagement, success measurement, feedback between teams and action orientation is core to keeping up momentum. Using platforms for collective program management such as Favro and Click-up can be helpful. In this way, teams can self-organise, use interactive timelines, allocate roles, tasks and organise work ‘sprints’. It is also useful from the organising teams point of view, as you can gain an overall assessment of each team’s progress.
• Community & Team building (‘tribe’ time): building ongoing time for teams to ‘check in’ is key to not only the ongoing learning of the process, but also in building collaboration between the participants. Think about any in-person program you have attended. When and how did the conversations for collaboration happen? Was it during a break-out session on a certain theme? Or during the coffee breaks? Wherever these initial conversations happen, it is also the continued relationships built whilst you move through a process together. So from the virtual design point of view. It is key that you design in consistent spaces where the participants can come together, and build relationships. Examples could include:
  
  • Weekly ‘open-space’ Zoom calls where participants bring themes, topics, questions or ideas to share. Then depending on the size of your groups, you can organise ‘break-out sessions’, a tool offered through Zoom, where your participants can explore the theme they are interested in. 
  • Regular ‘check-in’ circles. A very lightly facilitated space where participants are simply invited to share how they are, any insights or key learnings from the process, any challenges they might be facing. This can also just be an open space for people to have a conversation. But it is important, as the organising team, to communicate the purpose of the process, so that people know how to turn up. With all the additional community spaces, we would encourage attendance, but it is also important to respect people’s limitations, so if it feels appropriate for the group, one way of addressing this, is to record the sessions and post it to the group. Therefore, people that were unable to attend, can still feel connected to the content.
• Training/workshops/lectures/ focus groups: Again, the specific content you have designed, will depend heavily on the nature of your program. For translating any of these content pieces online, we suggest thinking as creatively as possible regarding the format of each piece. Like in any process, it is important to adapt your material to the different learning styles of your participants. For some this may mean predominantly visual, and for others predominantly verbal. Some people may need higher levels of participatory processes, others may need more time to reflect. As process designers, we cannot satisfy everyone’s needs all of the time, but we can design our programs to be varied and versatile. This may be even more important, when translating your program online, as participants will rely on the design to guide them into engaging in a certain way. Put simply, it is easy for virtual participants to remain passive, it is up to us to create ways of inviting different forms of virtual participation.
  
  Here’s a few examples:
  
  • Lectures/talks: Even if you have one predominant speaker, consider having moments of participant reflection. Pose a question to the group for them to respond to in the chat, or to respond to them visually through their cameras. For example, put your hands up if you have experienced X. Also, consider during lectures, applying various methods of visual interaction. Slides being the most common, but how about engaging photographs, a centerpiece, a candle burning- adapt to the style you want to create. Zoom also offers simple and quick toll processes, where participants can vote, or respond to a question. This builds participation, but also gives people a collective sense of the group. 
  • Workshops/training/focus groups: For the more interactive parts of your program, try to make them exactly that, interactive. Consider using platforms such as Mural and Miro where teams can collectively contribute to a virtual canvas, a clustering exercise, or a sense-making process. These platforms are built to mirror that of an in person workshop space, utilising virtual post-it notes and affinity boards. Again, this will depend on either having a facilitator to support the technical process, or having built the appropriate capabilities during your preparation phase. Simpler forms of creating interactive sessions online, are also in using Zoom’s whiteboard setting, breakout rooms, and poll process. Again, keep asking, what tools are available to me that can make this session more interactive, then mix it up!  

Follow up Phase:

One of the biggest challenges that we see in many program formats is the lack of a thorough follow up process.  So frequently, people will come together for an event, build new and exciting ideas, make big promises, declarations and commitments, but on returning to the everyday rhythm of life, too often these get lost along the way. The great thing about virtual programs  is that they are already much more embedded into participant’s general life patterns, the main through their basic proximity- for many, from the comfort of their own homes! But what is also a key, is the ability to follow up through continued virtual communication of already established platforms. This creates more opportunity for sustained participation and impact, as well as the potential for building strong virtual communities from around the world! Here are just a few key pointers for this follow-up phase:

• Gratitude & immediate follow-up
• Clarification & invitation to next program/events 
• Collecting feedback for continued program development 
• Building a community platform: Think program Alumni through Facebook pages, Slack channels etc. 
• Celebration! Every program needs a proper closing. Invite participants to celebrate their learnings, successes, failures, the relationships they’ve built, prototypes they’ve developed, partnerships they have made. Bring music into your celebration. Consider creating a collective playlist for the event. Have people bring something to drink or eat, and even invite participants to dress up! A nice process for a virtual celebration is to have a gratitude, or appreciation shower. Where participants take it in turns to appreciate each other, or the process as a whole. Depending on the size of the group. Giving people one minute each to share as many appreciations is a quick way of creating a warm and connected environment for a virtual celebration. 

Synchronous and Asynchronous interactions 

Of course, the design of your virtual program will highly depend on the nature of the program itself. What levels of participation do you need at different points of the process. And of course, the length and engagement duration you plan for you participants, will also have an impact. Everything that was spoken about in the first key answer of this document, will be relevant to those designing intentionally for the online space. There are, however, additional more detailed practicalities to be considered. 

A good starting point when designing online programs is to first identify what Salla Kuuluvainen talks about in virtual service design, as Synchronous and Asynchronous interactions.  Synchronous interactions are ‘online interactions that happen with participants at the same time’, the most commonly used example being that of the video conferencing format. This could also be live chat programs, or other forms of live-time interactive processes. A key point is that there is a specific time that all participants need to gather at the same time. Asynchronous interactions are those that ‘take place over a longer period of time’ and where ‘the participants are able to define themselves’ on an individual level. Kuuluvainen talks about the most familiar form being that of a group of people commenting on a shared document. There are many different platforms that now support Asynchronous interaction, such as Mural, Miro, and many of the social media platforms. 

Consider using more asynchronous methods, so as to give participants time to work at their own pace, to reflect on key questions and open up deeper levels of participation. Especially in the current climate, when so many of us are on screens for even more hours of the day, it is key that if it is possible, to have the synchronous methods as shorter, creative sessions where groups can make sense of what they have done as individuals. The increase in online projects and programs, has also resulted in some very interesting data regarding people’s participation. Trainers who, in person, had struggled to get their teams to turn up on time, are now finding that the online sessions have increased the groups punctuality quite significantly. There have also been comments of when effectively combining Synchronous and Asynchronous interactions within a design, the quality of the Synchronous (the collective process) is much higher. In that, people come prepared with what they want to share, are more aware of time shared as a group and therefore are taking more responsibility for ‘how’ they participate and its impact on themselves, the group and therefore ultimately on the core outcomes of the program itself. 

The reason we mention these two definitions, is that from a program design point of view, it is important to identify when different forms of interactions are needed for your participants, and from this place, be able to choose the appropriate online platform or tool. Through identifying this difference, you are able to then build in intentional ‘technical learning journeys’ into your program. For example, one of your core outcomes of intentionally designing an online program, is that by the end of the process, your participants have built core capacities in specific online platforms and project management tools. This outcome, you can design for by gradually bringing in different tools and platforms through the program in which the participants then engage with in an intentional manner. In other words, building technical literacy becomes a core objective of the program, which can bring many positive impacts from both the environmental and social standpoint. 

Building a virtual container- building trust and a sense of group connection

The ‘container’ is a common term adopted by process designers. Ultimately it means the space in which the participants step into, physically or virtually. It refers to the quality of connection that is invited through elements such as the physical space, so in person, this would be the room, or the physical setup that the participant group works in. In the virtual setting, this would be the virtual room or space that the participants gather. Most commonly this is through a virtual conferencing platform such as Zoom. But again the container speaks to what it looks and feels like to enter this space. For example, if you set up your virtual room with an inviting image that participants immediately see, or play music, this will create a certain atmosphere. This atmosphere is part of the container. For virtual containers, it’s important to be creative. You may be surprised how much you can translate into the virtual form, in creating a visceral feeling of space. Examples of container building are (again it will highly depend on the context of your program and your participant group in regards to what feels appropriate):

• Have the host play music on entry, choose music that depicts the mood you want to run the session from.
• Use visuals as much as possible. Having images of a physical space, like a circle of chairs can create a nice sense of physical connection.
• Invite exercises that allow participants to land into the space, also known as ‘presencing’ exercises. This could include guided meditation, inviting a moment of silence, ringing a bell and inviting people to focus on their breath for a minute, inviting people to pay attention to what they can see around the physical space they are in. 
• Containers are also built out of participant connection. Ask a question that invites a level of depth and have everyone answer in the chat. For example, share one thing that you deeply care about. Or what brought joy to your life these past few days?
• Have the host light a candle and show it to the participants. This simple action has a powerful effect on a space, especially if wanting to bring in a level of ceremony into a process. 

Another important point in building and retaining a virtual container is to have ‘principles of practice’, or participation agreements. These can be simple rules that the organising team requests for participants to follow, or it can be a set of co-created agreements built by the participants. To support this process, it might be worth asking the group, what type of container they want for their process. Answers could include a feeling of presence, free of distractions. A feeling of trust to be authentic. A respectful space for people’s differences and limitations etc. From this you can then pose the question of what rules or principles do we as a group want to build in order to create this successful space? 

Examples could include:

• Agreements to turn off notifications during collective calls. 
• Turn on videos whenever possible (wifi dependent)
• Remain muted, whilst others speak 
• Use a virtual language- signals to show interaction (jazz hands are one of our favourites)

Building a container, can sometimes mean, as an organising team, stepping outside of our comfort zones. Especially in the virtual realm, people will rely on the hosts to depict the environment and mood of a process. If you invite a higher level of depth or even vulnerability into your facilitation or hosting, this has an amazing effect at giving ‘permission’ for your participants to follow suit and do the same. This is also known as effective modeling. So don’t be afraid to try something new, people are more than often grateful for a deeper level of engagement with others, especially in the virtual realm. 

Prepare your team with clear roles and responsibilities: Be present for your participants

In designing virtual programs, it is important to understand what different roles and responsibilities there are within the organising team. There are many roles that have emerged out of the ever-developing tech world, but it is important to really ground it in what most serves the core purpose of your program and participants. Most importantly is that you focus on how to ensure your participants can be fully present in their engagement of each process, as well as providing quality content that allows them to feel their time has been invested well. Some common roles for the design and delivery of virtual programs are:

• Speakers- Specialized content delivery 
• Trainers- Specialized content delivery- interactive training 
• Program & session designers 
• Program management- coordination, scheduling,  
• Event hosts- Core facilitators 
• Break-out room facilitators 
• Note-takers
• Visual harvesters 
• Technical support 
• Feedback support 

Once you have determined which roles are needed for your program, it is essential that you ensure your team has the technical capabilities to meet the needs of each role. There are many support platforms for building these additional capabilities if your team is lacking, but the best way to increase technical capacities is to practice. Try running online sessions for your team where you practice your roles, test out new and creative ways of engaging with participants, play and don’t be afraid to try something new. Use your team, practice, ask for feedback and remember to have fun! 

It is also important if you are planning for a larger scale event, as part of your program, for example a multi-occupant speaker event, that you have sufficient ‘behind the scenes’ capacity to ensure a smooth process. For example, it is always good to have ‘facilitator buddies’ where one has more of a front facing role, and the other is offering support by, for example, answering questions, or dropping links into the chat. 

It is essential that everyone in your team is clearly aligned with the core conference objectives. A central part of the preparation phase is ensuring this alignment. For example, it is not enough just to have great thought leaders, or experienced individuals booked for each of your sessions, but sessions also need to be linked in a way that makes sense to the participants and that feels like a smooth journey throughout. It is especially important that you work directly with any external speakers. 

For some of the more major parts of your program, you may want to consider having a ‘run-through’, or practice session, to give everyone on your team the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the digital setting. For speakers, a short training session to ensure that sessions run smoothly, can also be helpful, especially if they are not as familiar with delivering through a virtual platform. This also gives you the opportunity to fix any possible technical issues with the platforms, so as to reduce the likelihood of it happening on the day of the event. 

The art of harvesting- capturing the journey 

Another key consideration, when designing a virtual program, is to think about how you aim to capture, or ‘harvest’ the different parts of the process. For example, how to capture the key learnings, insights, and collective sense-making done in a workshop. Or how to help easily translate the content of a talk or training to other stakeholders. One way to do this is to employ a virtual graphic recorder to live harvest (draw) during your program. This is an amazing and interactive way to capture your process in live time. It is also a perfect way to continue a process of sense-making within your participant group, as it provides them with a physical image to take away and reflect on individually and with their own communities. 

Harvesting is often neglected during the design and delivery of any program, whether it be virtual or in person. This can result in a large amount of the learnings and core content being lost, especially when it comes to delivering on actions. So often, even with the best container, and highest level of engagement present in a process, once we step out of the held space, much of what was experienced or dreamt up, gets lost. Having a harvesting process, ensures that we capture learnings as we go along, which then in turn we can send out to our participants, as physical reminders of the journey they are on, key insights observed and actions agreed upon.

An example from Think Visual around the topic of circular economy

What can/can’t be translated- constantly evolving

The good news is, different does not need to mean bad, but it does mean adaptation. For example adapting our teams and our participants expectations of what we can and can’t do in a virtual space. What is appropriate to attempt in the virtual form, and what is essential to be done in person. This question is ever evolving and is the subject of many conversations regarding ethics, quality and social and environmental impact. The important point that we are trying to make is that there are many things that can be done virtually, that are not currently being considered. This distinction of what should, or shouldn’t, what can or can’t be translated to the virtual form, is highly context specific. Meaning, it is up to you, your team and your key stakeholders to make this decision. But if you do take the decision to design for online, there are some key factors that can ensure that you create something that is not only meeting a programmatic need, but is also delivering something of high quality to your various stakeholders. 

Designing to the deeper needs of your participants

A good starting point in designing any quality program, which will in turn, result in high levels of participation and engagement is to ask the question, is your program truly responding to the needs of the participants? Or is it an idea in action? Meaning, is it the result of a brilliant idea that you and your team-mates had of what you felt would be a compelling and rewarding program for these same stakeholders? The difference here is, are you designing from a place of assumptions, or from a place of people-centred research? This is not to say that having impassioned ideas are a bad thing, far from it! Ideas are the cornerstones of innovation, but in designing for a specific stakeholder group, it is essential that we ‘test’ these ideas before executing them. Especially when designing virtual programs, where the idea of actually choosing to pay for an online program over that of an in person one,  is still relatively new and one that needs some solid and convincing evidence in support of. Therefore, designing your program around not just the needs of accessing high quality content, but also around the additional benefits that the virtual form meets over that of in person. A few examples include:

• More adaptive around other priorities: Family, business, travel restraints etc.  
• Environmental impact: Combined carbon costs of travel and accommodation can result in large carbon impact per each participant. Virtual events heavily reduce this cost.
• Condensed and easily accessible information for continued learning & follow up 

Respecting diversity of participants needs, participation styles

Creating quality ‘people centered’ designs for virtual programs also requires a level of adaptation in regards to diversity of needs. Especially if your programs are aimed at a diverse stakeholder group, it is essential that you design for inclusivity. What this means in practice, is to identify the different needs that may be present in your chosen demographic. This process can be done both prior to invitation and once you have a confirmed participant group. For example, you may want to make an assessment of some of the needs that are present in your group through a short survey process. This can be particularly helpful in assessing the different technical levels present across your teams. The reason we highlight the need to understand the diversity present is that you can then design how to more strategically meet these needs into your programs. This will then increase participants’ experiences of being ‘met’ and in most likelihoods will increase participation. The more we design to meet people’s needs, the more people will see, feel and continue to experience value in turning up.

Get creative- Virtual Pedagogy- prototype, play, interact

As in any process, creativity is an essential part to achieving quality outcomes. Designing predominantly for virtual spaces, can to some seem like a technological dream, a puzzle to be explored, a new tool for innovation and for others it can feel like a daunting, complex new domain with endless amounts of information and applications. Wherever you land on this spectrum, the virtual domain does offer a large variety of different tools, platforms and applications that can be used in different and creative ways. When choosing your tools, it is again essential to assess, is this truly meeting the needs of the program goals and its participants. We as process designers, especially the ones that sit on the more technological side of the spectrum, can get very excited about innovative new tools and want to ‘try them out’. Again, this is fine and experimentation is something we definitely encourage, but it is key that our passion for a tool doesn’t override the needs of our participants. 

For example, if we found a new infinity board program that we felt would be a perfect way to build interaction amongst participants, however, when assessing our participant group, we found that most were only familiar with very basic functions of one video conferencing site and some were in places with very limited wifi, our application of this tool may not be a wise one. We can very easily create spaces of exclusion, if the virtual pedagogy that we choose to apply, does not respond to the needs of our participants. 

This is not to say that inviting people into experimenting with new technology is a bad thing, but it is about finding the right balance. Where can you meet people where they are, whilst inviting them onto their learning edge. This is a question asked by a lot of educational workers and one that also needs to be considered when designing virtual programs. The fact of this, is that many people are continuously learning in this domain, so how do we as program designers ensure a positive and engaging learning journey? A great example of a recent event that invited a highly diverse group into exploring their core challenges through the virtual platform Mural, was WWF’s global virtual hackathon WWF versus Virus. A Hackathon designed to help staff from across the 16,000 employee network to come together to share their challenges in working during the Covid19 pandemic in 2020. People from across the world participated in the process, many of which had never used Mural before. The key to this event’s success was thorough preparation work from the organising team in making the platform as clear and easy to navigate as possible. They also used breakout room facilitators who had been trained prior to the event and who could support participants through any blockers they might experience. The event was a great success, and many people commented on their positive experience with Mural. 

Building human connection

We don’t need to say that in designing for the success of any program, the way people feel coming in, during and then leaving is essential. A key element of this is simply down to how people feel connected to the program content, the other participants and to themselves during the process. It is important to consider all three of these elements and continue to ask the questions, how do we, as virtual program designers, support our participants to feel more connected across all of these levels? Building quality, authentic human connection virtually is indeed much more of a challenge than that of in person, where the simple physical present of another is often enough to satisfy these needs. But human connection also comes in different forms. The simple fact that we, at any moment, can connect with people from across the world, share visual recognition of one another through our screens, is still a truly extraordinary experience. So yes it is different, but also the question is, what does this difference make possible for us and our planet?