Show your care for event organizers and attendees.
Communications play an key role in building trust before an event. All the work you do to invite feedback on your plans and prototypes demonstrates your care for your learners’ needs. By involving event organizers and potential attendees in your design work ahead of an event, you make it clear that meeting your goals in entirely dependent on meeting the needs of your learners. That’s a powerful statement. During planning, you should do all you can to involve - and draw on the experiences and expertise - of the people with whom you’ll work as a facilitator.
Share your materials as you develop them. Iterate on both your agenda and individual activities. Get feedback from people who can help you better understand your audience, constraints, and event. You can even establish something like a public community forum or discussion thread about the work ahead of your event so potential attendees can help co-design their learning.
Invite stakeholders to calls or meetings. Don’t rely solely on email to create a connection and build trust between your team and your audience. Schedule a virtual or face-to-face meeting so you can listen to feedback in real-time, ask about potential solutions to your design problems, and make the responsiveness of your planning process visible to your stakeholders. You don’t need to invite everyone to every meeting, but establish a regular cadence of invitations and involvement.
Publish your agenda ahead of your event. Let people see and explore it online to get a feel for the kinds of activities they’ll be doing. Help them know what to bring and how to look at the day. Share your activities and lessons so others can see the support, choice, and agency you’ve built in each.
Recognize your contributors. Before, during, and after your facilitation, be sure to thank and credit the people who inform and improve your work ahead of an event. This is another way to build trust by acknowledging your needs as a facilitator and the labor others have poured into your preparation.
Communicate openly. Communicate often. Don’t keep your plans secret. Invite people to to contribute to your work and show them the steps you’re taking to serve them and their learning needs.
During an event, make as many small loop design decisions as you can manage to be responsive to what’s going on in the moment and around the room.
This is a huge deal in facilitation. Rather than barrel through your agenda, you should conduct it instead - slowing down, speeding up, and modulating your tone and energy as you go to encourage learners and help them achieve the best learning performances possible.
This is the time to
- Pause, reflect, and act on what’s working or not working.
- Shuffle the order of activities in a way that makes sense for your learners.
- Switch to an alternative activity.
- Punt on activities that fail and frustrate learners.
- Surface and discuss questions that might help the whole group.
- Check in with your table-wranglers to see how things are going.
- Repeat a step if most audience members are having trouble with it.
- Slow down or speed up depending on what your learners need.
- Take a break.
- Give people a chance to move or be still.
- Record your timings to help plan future events.
- Take notes for your debrief.
- Ask your learners what they need and then do that thing instead of the next step you planned.
As you practice small-loop design and responsive facilitation, you’ll get better and better at managing multiple decisions like this and accounting to breakpoints in your planning. To begin, really commit to one or two of these habits and practice them throughout your event. For example, you might make it a point to stop and ask for feedback after each activity, or you might check-in with table wranglers during each activity to see when they think learners could use a break.
Finally, be true to your word. For example, if you’re about to break for lunch and you ask learners what they want more of in the afternoon, be ready to deliver more of what they want in terms of types of activities or topics to cover. If you ask what learners need, and someone yells, “Chocolate!”, get some chocolate (“Pssst. Where can I run out to get some chocolate during lunch?”).
To build trust during an event you have to show learners that you’re listening and responding to what they have to say. Doing otherwise breaks trust instead of building it.
To keep building trust and relationships with learners after an event, maker it easy for them to give you feedback and show them that you’re still listening.
At the very end of your event, ask participants to complete a survey sharing their feedback. Ask them
- Which activities stood out in a positive way?
- Which activities stood out in a negative way?
- How would they improve the class, session, or workshop?
- How would they improve a particular activity?
- What did they learn?
- How did they feel at the start of the event? How do they feel now?
- You can see a sample survey from a Mozilla event run for librarians here:
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Use the feedback you get to revise your agenda and activities for next time. You can go over the results with your team and event organizers as part of your debriefing process which we’ll think through in a later section.
You should also set up a public community discussion forum ahead of the event that learners can use afterwards to stay connected with one another, to stay connected with you, and to stay informed about the changes you make to future plans based on their feedback.
The survey and forum, in combination with one another, will show your learners that you depend on them to improve your work for others. Thank them for their participation in your event and recognize the contribution they make to future events by giving you their feedback on your work.
First, make sure that you’ve invited feedback on your agenda and activities from your participants. If you haven’t, schedule a call or meeting to invite participation from people attendees can help you better prepare for your event.
Then, make sure your plan for the day includes breakpoints for reading the room and responding to what you hear and see. You don’t need to include these moments in your public-facing agenda, but make sure you and your team know when it’s time to huddle up in the moment and make any necessary changes to the day as you facilitate.
Finally, be ready with a post-survey and some kind of community forum for event attendees. Use the survey to ask how you can improve the class, session, or workshop for next time. Use the forum to keep attendees in touch with one another and with you so that they can
- Ask follow-up questions and keep learning from you and peers.
- Ask how to adapt or remix your agenda and activities for local audiences.
- Stay informed about the changes you make to future plans based on their feedback.
To summarize:
- Before your event, schedule a virtual or face-to-face meeting to get feedback from key stakeholders.
- Before your event, set up the post-survey and public forum you’ll use to collect feedback afterwards.
- Before your event, plan those breakpoints when you and your team will stop to assess your performance and respond to what’s happening in the moment and around the room.
- During your event, use those breakpoints to iterate on your plans in real time.
- After your event, use your post-survey and public forum to keep your learners connected to one another, to your team, and to changes you’ll make in your future plans based on their feedback.