You’ve done all of your planning and preparation for your upcoming conference, meeting or learning event. You’ve engaged a graphic recorder to support with creating engaging live visual summaries for each of the sessions for your client. But then there’s a change of plans. Perhaps using live graphic recording is no longer a feasible option. You still would like to create engagement and collaborative learning opportunities through individual or group visual work. Here are 3 alternatives you can consider to bring in some of the creative energy, learning value and engagement that thoughtful visual tools bring into your room.
Visual Templates
Create a meaningful visual template for personal or group reflection or discussion
Preparation: This can be a worksheet, large poster, whiteboard, or a large writeable surface, which is prepared ahead of the event, using visual elements and specific questions related to the intended outcomes of your event.
Benefits: This adds an interactive element which participants remember and talk about. It also creates living documentation of your event and captures a cross-section of ideas and messages. These messages and the visual can be a great item to share post-event with your participants, as a tool for follow up and action planning, and as a discussion starter on social media.
Community Engagement Wall
An extension of a visual template is a Community Engagement Wall, or “Graffiti Wall”. This is a large interactive surface on which you invite participants to write, draw, share thoughts, takeaways, commitments before, during and after a specific session in your event.
We recently worked with Lego for their Asia Sales Conference and created a huge Community sketch wall in the form of a giant Lego brick. The participants loved sharing their personal insights on marketing strategies and appreciated the effort to reflect the brand messaging in a creative large scale format.
Tip: Remember to add your event hashtags to encourage social sharing
Post Event Summary of Key Points
Send us your notes and summary of key points post event, and we can work them into a meaningful visual summary. This can be a great follow up for your participants post-event.
Look out for follow-up articles where we will go in-depth into each of the above visual tools.
Benefits of having visual tools to support your event:
Encourages collaboration and bigger picture thinking
Helps participants to connect the dots on key themes, objectives, relevant discussions, and takeaways
Supports decision making and action planning
Creates a sense of shared ownership in the results
Signals to participants “this is going to be a different kind of meeting”, and sets participants up to be a more active contributor to the outcomes
We hope you find these ideas useful for your event planning and preparation. We are always looking at ways to make a more memorable, valuable, and successful client experience in all we do. Would you like to learn more ways to create an engaging event using visual tools? Join us in our upcoming Visual Facilitation Lab in Singapore June 14-15 #artofawakening #visualeventsupport #visualfacilitation #visualfacilitationlab #VFL #visualworkshop #graphicfacilitation #graphicfacilitationasia