This document provides tips and resources for increasing engagement during digital sessions. It recommends treating audiences as participants, using cameras, polling audiences early, and modeling interactive behaviors. Further reading resources on remote work and online classrooms are included. The Community Roundtable offers services like research, training, and an online network for members.

1. Using Digital Channels in a Crisis: Community Best Practices for Connecting and Collaborating
Resources
1) Tips to increase engagement
2) Resources and reading
3) Services from The Community
Roundtable

2. Alex Blanton: Tips to Increase Engagement
• Treat the audience as participants before the session starts
• Sound checks, visual checks, chatting them up
• “Seed” the audience with a couple of active participants
• Turn on your camera while you start the session
• Ask the audience to interact right away – use the first 5 minutes to teach the audience how to use the interactive
features of your software
• Examples: Poll, whiteboard
• Use peer pressure by making participation a requirement for moving on
• “We have 35 people in the session, and 16 of you have completed the poll. Once we get to 30 we can continue…”
• Model interactive behavior by being present in the session and intervening when necessary
• Sometimes I ask a question about 10-15 minutes in, just to show people that it’s okay to do so
• Make the IM something to pay attention to
• Ask questions, answer questions, provide context, provide content, @mention people, like messages
• Vary your interaction requests
• Voice, chat, checkmarks, polls, whiteboarding, screen annotation, etc.
• Complete your slides in the moment
• Maybe: Have a controversial statement on the slide, and say “Now I’m going to type True and False on the screen, and I want you to
put a check-mark under one word or the other to show what you think, then we’ll discuss.”

3. Further Reading and Resources
1. Managing Teams that are Suddenly Remote – The Community Roundtable Blog
2. Working in a coronavirus world: Strategies and tools for staying productive –
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet
3. 20 Tips for Working from Home – PCMag
4. How to Manage Remote Direct Reports – Rebecca Night, HBR
5. How to Manage Remote Teams Effectively – Society for Human Resource
Managers (SHRM)
6. Creating an Online Classroom – Stanford Online Highschool
7. Five Can’t Miss Community Programming Ideas – The Community Roundtable
eBook

4. Services from The Community Roundtable
https://the.cr/SOCM2019
Research On-Demand Training
TheCR Network
Membership
Social Learning with Peers;
including hundreds of
reports, training, and
weekly roundtable calls
Online community and
engagement training and
exercises
(available for licensing)