Greetings from Barcelona☀️where we are starting to feel the chill of autumn 🍂.
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest, your weekly round-up of tips and insights to help you design and lead exceptional virtual sessions that your group members will love❤️.
✋Hands up if you have ever struggled to track engagement in your sessions.
👉You find it hard to focus on your session and the chat at the same time…
👉Even if you try to narrate chat responses they whiz by too quickly to catch them all…
👉The sheer volume of messages in the chat means that you miss important questions that come up during the session…
Your session ends, and you have no way of knowing how engaging your session has been. And you don’t know which group members engaged, and – crucially – which ones did not.
Tracking engagement is one of the most challenging parts of virtual facilitation.
The problem is that when you leave comments unread and questions unanswered your group members can feel ignored. It can make them feel hesitant to take part.
When you track engagement your group members feel seen and heard. It builds trust in you. And it gives you vital information about how to give your group members a better online experience.
Back in March, I wrote about 10 Digital Tools to Try to help you increase engagement. But how do you track engagement? The list included a newly-launched AI-powered interactive platform called StreamAlive that answers that question.
I’ve been a beta tester of StreamAlive since then. I haven’t seen anything else like it that helps you to track engagement in the same way. That’s what I am excited to share with you.
🤔How do you use StreamAlive to increase and track engagement? That’s our Quest for this week🔎
👉Magic Maps to help you “see” participants
👉Quick Questions to help you “hear” participants
👉Engagement Tracking Analytics that will help you increase engagement from all group members
(P.S. Full transparency: I don’t receive any financial benefit. And you don’t have to pay to use it:)
Let’s jump right in.
1/ 🌍StreamAlive’s Magic Map
An interactive map feature that allows the group to “see” where your participants are calling in from.
And yes, you are right. Mentimeter and other platforms also have an interactive map feature. But unlike Mentimeter, StreamAlive is integrated right into the Zoom chat. You don’t need to generate a new link and send your group members to another site (and deal with the inevitable tech glitches that come along with it).
Participants write their city and country right in the chat and it appears on the map like this👇
Check out their word cloud and poll features that are integrated into the chat.
2/ 🙋🏾Quick Questions Feature
A feature that allows participants to type questions and StreamAlive will magically capture it – as they put it in the chat 🤯.
Yes, it’s true. Zoom has a Q&A tab. The problem is that most people write their questions in the chat. Even if you give them clear instructions to write it in the Q&A tab. Why? Because it’s way easier.
StreamAlive scans for questions from the chat during the session and generates a list that you can pull up at any time👇
3/ 📊 StreamAlive Analytics
The Analytics feature allows you to track engagement during a session. You can track “fantastic fans” who engage the most with your session. And you can see the engagement highs and lows for each interactive activity.
Mentimeter has a basic analytics feature with their enterprise plan. But it focuses on indicators like the number of Mentimeter presentations created by your team members. When what you want to know is how your group members are engaging throughout your session.
Here’s what the engagement analytics for our dry test run this afternoon looked like👇
Check out StreamAlive 👉 here.
What strategies and tools do you use to track engagement in your virtual sessions?
🎥Video of the Week
I caught up with StreamAlive CEO, Co-founder, and friend Lux Narayan last week on the new features. He shared some insights on how StreamAlive is bringing the power of the chat to hybrid meetings.
Check out this 1m40s clip where he explains how it works👇
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Creatively yours,
