Improve your Conferences in 2 Steps

Both audio conferencing and web conferencing offer countless benefits – ranging all the way from cost savings to a smaller carbon footprint. However, in order to acquire the highest return on your conferencing services investment, it is crucial that every meeting you conduct is as productive and effective as possible. So far this month we’ve covered the top 5 most essential features for any web conference as well as the top 5 mistakes web conferencing hosts make. Now, I’m going to offer you a couple zealous suggestions for enhancing (and adding a little spice) to your conferences.

1. First and foremost, your conferences should be about, by and for your participants. They should feel encouraged to offer feedback and participate through multiple venues, for example, white boarding, chat, polling, and Q&A sessions. Thankfully, conferencing services offer multiple features that ensure participants are actively involved in meetings.
   For conferences with a large group of participants, a moderator is preferred to keep the conference on track and under control. Your moderator/MC should challenge, integrate, pull together, and basically act as the ambassador of your participants. That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook though, you need to be just as active in your conference as any moderator, MC, speaker or presenter – don’t just be a warm body!
2. In order to keep your audience interested and actively engaged in your conference, try restructuring it. Break away from the mundane ‘pick a theme, an opening and/or closing speaker, and in between the same old stuff’ that makes participants feel like they’re in a typical workday that their boss has scheduled for them. Instead, keep your audience fascinated by letting your conference tell a unique story. As with any good story, there are valleys of calm, rises of anticipation, and ultimately peaks of exhilaration and excitement – something light-years away from boredom and panic in perpetual alteration. That being said, your conference should also make sense from a linear start-to-finish point of view. That way your participants are more likely to retain the information they take in as opposed to feeling overwhelmed.

Additional Resources
At ConferenceShopper.com we provide our customers with private labeled audio and web conferencing services, IP transit, and private line services via a network of Tier One providers. Our winning combination of experienced account managers and unique relationships inside the telecommunications industry allow us to provide our customers with unbiased, carrier neutral suggestions as to how they should handle their communications services for the best prices available.