How To: Organize a Successful Online Meeting

The problem with these meetings is the same problem of any meeting: How do you get people to attend your meeting, and how do you keep your audience engaged and interested throughout the meeting?

Inviting participants

Many of these online meeting programs offer email invitation features that you can use to invite the people you would like to join your meeting. Many know how to send mass emails, and with the advancements of email programs and integrations with these conferencing tools you can invite people with just a few clicks. Highlight, cut and paste the meeting URL into the body of your email when you send your invitations. These programs will instantly take the participant to the virtual room for the meeting so all the participants have to do is click the link within the email.

Practice a lot

It may seem silly, but rehearsing what you want to say is a good idea. It will make your meeting flow more smoothly and allow you time to clear any bugs out of your presentation. Your goal, after all, is to have your audience listening to you actively and not passively. Your presentation is an outline of information not the entire meeting. With an online meeting, you are guaranteed to lose them if you are doing nothing more than reading exactly what is on the screen. Practicing what you want to say and use your presentation as an outline not the entire meeting.

Schedule carefully, less is more

Your business runs at the speed of business. The longer you keep your employees in a meeting the less interested they will be. Keep your meeting short, sweet and if you have a schedule, stick to the schedule. Try to leave things out in your presentation where possible, it will help you to make your meeting interesting from the first second to the last.

If you liked this article and would love to learn more about organizing decent online meetings, we also recommend you to read Microsoft’s article with online meeting tips.