Best Practices for Elevating Your Internal Virtual Events

As more organizations move to a hybrid work model, engaged, satisfied employees are key to an effective hybrid workforce. To keep such a dispersed workforce connected, many organizations are engaging employees through interactive virtual events. 

However, the challenge is creating internal events that both on-site and remote employees can enjoy and find valuable. Here are our best practices and tips for creating engaging internal events: 

With a hybrid workforce, employees are dispersed across offices, homes, and possibly the globe. You’ll need an easily accessible technology that everyone can use with all the right features to engage your audiences. However, you’ll also need a solution that meets your needs and creates a seamless presenter experience. 

The type of event you’re hosting and the type of experience you want your audience to have will determine the type of solution you should use. For many internal events such as all-hands meetings, fireside chats, and town halls, you’ll want to give one person, or a handful of people, the ability to reach a large audience. However, you also want to avoid distractions and interruptions such as background noise or distracting camera feeds.

For these larger events where presenting without interruptions is important, we recommend using our webinar solution, Zoom Webinars. Zoom Webinars allows you to seamlessly host large internal events by only allowing hosts, co-hosts, and panelists to enable their cameras and microphones. We also recommend running your Zoom webinar sessions on Zoom Events, our all-in-one event management solution, which offers the features and structure to help you run customized, dynamic events. 

But just because attendees don’t have their cameras and microphones doesn’t mean you can’t engage with them! Zoom Webinars has a number of features that enable you to connect with your attendees. Here are a few ways you can use Zoom webinar features to create an engaging internal event: 

Share content - Having on-screen content to support the points being covered in your event helps to keep the audience engaged and provides a stimulating visual element. Using the screen share feature, you can share slide decks, pictures, videos, applications, and more, allowing you to customize the experience. 

Chat - The in-webinar chat allows attendees to chat with each other and panelists, which allows people to interact and share their thoughts in real time. If you’d like to keep the focus on the speaker, however, you can disable this feature or allow attendees to chat with panelists only. 

Raise Hand - This feature allows attendees and panelists to provide nonverbal feedback in the form of a raised hand emoji on their video feed. This makes it easy for co-hosts to know which panelists would like to speak and allows for a more dynamic and free-form discussion. 

Polls, surveys, and Q&A - Polls provide questions and pre-selected answers for attendees to select from, surveys offer a list of questions that can be multi-choice or long-form, while Q&A provides a specific area for attendees to ask questions and have them answered. 

Many of our customers are using Zoom Events, our all-in-one event management platform, to coordinate their internal events as well. Zoom Events works great for internal events that are more involved with multiple sessions and speakers like sales summits or new hire orientations. Zoom Events Hubs can also be used to organize internal activities like Employee Resource Group events so employees know exactly where to go to find activities they might be interested in.  Here are a few best practices for using Zoom Events: 

Use the Event Hub for streamlined organization - Create an Event Hub within Zoom Events to provide attendees (your employees) with easy access to all of your organization’s events and recordings of those events as well. You can also use the Event Hub to access event analytics, set Hub Host permissions, create custom branding, customize multi-session events, and more. 

Customize your Event pages, ticketing & registration - Using the Event Hub to create and customize event profile pages allows you to give your attendees a detailed sneak-peek at what you’ll be covering with event details and relevant images and video links. You can also create a seamless registration process by customizing your ticketing and registration, allowing you to enable free or paid tickets, offer panelist, alternative host, or attendee tickets, and restrict tickets to a guest list or certain domains.

Increase engagement with event reporting - Get the insights you need to continually increase engagement and improve attendance at your internal events with the Event Summary dashboard, which offers key metrics regarding registrations, attendance, and more. 

Drive internal networking with the Event Lobby - Zoom Events offers an Event Lobby, which allows attendees to chat with one another and learn more about the session before they join. Attendees can also request other attendees to direct chat or video conference, giving attendees the chance to loosen up and engage with each other before the event. 

Zoom Webinars enables you to host dynamic internal events. However, even the most engaging events won’t be successful if you don’t properly prepare. Here are some guiding principles to help you avoid issues and create stunning events: 

Do a practice run - To avoid any surprises, misunderstandings, or issues with hardware, you should hold a dry run with your panelists and co-hosts before the actual event. You can easily schedule a practice webinar where only the relevant parties can join, giving you the perfect opportunity to practice transitions, sequences, and more.

Set a clear agenda - At the beginning of your event, be sure to articulate the agenda for your audience. This helps them understand what you’ll be covering and gives them a reason to stick around. Using a slide to summarize the event at the beginning is a great way to get things off on the right foot. You can also send out an email before the event that goes over what you’ll cover. 

Use your co-hosts to create a seamless experience - In a Zoom webinar, a co-host has all of the same abilities as the host, including the ability to share content and unmute panelists. By having a co-host take over behind-the-scenes responsibilities like unmuting panelists, addressing questions in chat, advancing slides in a presentation, and creating a poll, you can create a seamless attendee experience and a higher degree of production. 

Host a variety of speakers - Providing a variety of speakers and panelists throughout your event keeps the content fresh. Instead of having your CEO speak for an hour, have them begin the event and introduce the panelists as they cover different topics to create a more dynamic and engaging experience. 

For more information on how you can use Zoom Events to create dynamic internal events, please visit our Zoom Events page. And to learn more about hosting engaging internal events at your organization, watch the recording of our webinar, How to Run an Engaging Internal Event.