This year has been a long one. With 2020 coming to a close, the O2O team is sharing some of our ideas for engaging your membership, and advancing your 2021 digital goals. There are many ways to connect with your membership online, and we would like to highlight best practices for two methods: surveys and online event facilitation.
Surveys
Surveys can be presented in several ways and administered throughout a campaign. Although they typically cost more per lead than petitions, surveys often have a higher percentage of hand-raisers–since people who have taken the time to fill out a are also more likely willing to engage in an organizing conversation with you. What’s more the information gathered on surveys can also be used to help inform strategy, understand a workplace issue more deeply and engage or re-engage membership. One way to engage your membership while you’re headed out for the holidays is to send your membership an end-of-the-year survey. Questions like, “What did we do well this year? What should we focus on next year?” are great light touch engagement opportunities to stay connected to gain insight about what will matter most to your membership in the new year.
Some other helpful survey reminders:
1. Get clear on the purpose of your survey.
Develop the goal of your survey prior to administering it so that you can cater survey questions, target your audience, and determine what success looks like.
2. If it’s a new list, KISS. Keep It Short & Simple.
If your focus is engaging with new people who you’ve never talked with before to collect their contact information, work out the minimum amount of information you need to collect and design a simple, direct survey based on the decided issue. The more simple and direct your survey is, the higher the likelihood people will fill it out. To optimize response rates, limit your survey to 3-5 questions (not including contact info), with only one open-ended question.
3. Follow up, follow up, follow up.
Make a plan for the follow up. You’ll need to decide who is doing the follow up and how it will happen. PRO TIP: 24-48 hours. Decide who will be responsible for engaging the leads and how they will do so. Have next steps ready for leads and hand-raisers to plug into your campaign
Virtual Facilitation Quick Tips:
We’ve all probably experienced zoom fatigue in 2020 but here are some quick facilitation tips to keep your virtual meetings & events exciting!
Some helpful facilitation reminders:
1. Begin meetings with nice to knows or community agreements.
Community agreements are especially important with new groups of people who have never met before or people who are not yet used to meetings in virtual spaces. Community agreements can be made together in an activity or facilitators can pre-form them and gain consent from participants. Nice-to-knows include: muting mics to reduce background noise, start and end on time, policy around videos on, etc.)
2. Have an agenda beforehand.
This saves EVERYBODY time and will help you as a facilitator understand where the meeting or event needs to land. We recommend the POP format, Purpose, Outcome, Process:
Purpose → Why: Why are we holding this meeting?
Outcomes → What: What needs to accomplish by the end of this meeting? (Be specific!)
Process→ How: How will meeting outcomes be achieved? This is the process of building the agenda. These are the items that will be facilitated based on your outcomes.
3. Practice participatory facilitation!
Check for agreement through active consent. This can be done through polls & temperature checks, Gifs, Reaction buttons or prompts such as “Put your favorite cereal in the chat if you have ever used Zoom before.” You can also garner feedback by asking folks to utilize the chat box or by calling on users directly or in groups of three.
To learn even more about online event facilitation, surveys and membership engagement we encourage you to register for our 3-day Online 2 Offline trainings.