#14: Collaborative Platforms: How digital workspaces can redefine your work sessions
The demand for effective digital engagement is higher than ever. Most public outreach plans begin with a strategic work session—but when in-person meetings are not feasible, how do you create a team environment? Work sessions using collaborative platforms, such as Miro and Mural, can transform a passive meeting into a dynamic, inclusive interaction that excites and involves participants, setting the stage for collaborative success. Public engagement strategies, which require considering multiple demographics, inclusive tactical approaches, messaging and methods, are best mapped in a collective effort. These dynamic digital workspaces turn remote planning from a solo activity to a collective brainstorm you'll want to make part of your team approach.
What is a collaborative platform?
Think of them as your modern-day whiteboard. Collaborative platforms are digital whiteboards that allow participants to add, move, combine, and comment on a digital board's ideas using tools like notes to contribute to topics in frames. It's similar to what might happen in a conference room meeting, but everyone involved can be active concurrently, and ideation tends to move quickly and efficiently. You can assign a post-it color to each participant to make post-session organizing easier, or just let the ideas fly. And, don't stop at engagement strategy—these platforms are excellent product development tools, managing agile workflows, and publication mapping. An added plus—the tools can record the session and provide screenshots of your project in development.
Easy to use and free to try, here are a few ways collaborative platforms can change your approach:
Put a stop to endless video calls. Suppose your team is growing weary of a day spent on Zoom or its counterparts. In that case, these solutions are made for distributed and remote teams, solving the video fatigue that has become pervasive.
Give everyone a voice. It's often the loudest whose ideas are heard in video calls, leaving potentially great input unsaid and unconsidered. Every attendee is an active participant in collaborative platforms; just watch the new ideas flow.
Better than in-person. Some of these platforms also enable video chat components, facilitator tools, and timed activity to keep the flow going and directed.
How can these trends improve public engagement?
Real-time engagement. Take collaborative platforms from planning to the public. With a bit of practice, you can use these platforms effectively in workshop settings, enabling real-time collaboration that creates a record of input.
Facilitate the conversation. Using capabilities already built into the paid version of these platforms, you can manage the session, facilitate discussions, manage time, and even integrate a poll.
Report back easily. The best public engagement strategies report back to stakeholders, letting them know how their ideas are being used. With these platforms, you can quickly return to your audiences with images of boards or share them on social media or websites, letting your audiences know they were heard.
Collaborate and Listen
Collaborative platforms make everyone an active participant. They can become a center of collective thinking you'll return to again and again. Unconstrained by location, these platforms open the door to inclusivity, and participation can be facilitated via phone for those without computer access. When a topic is raised on a collaborative platform, you can use an "attention management" tool to bring all the participants to a single area, asking them to consider the topic before moving on. There's room for everyone in collective platforms—the bold and the shy, the technologically savvy and the newcomer. But these platforms are hardly a free-for-all. With tools that enable facilitation, timekeeping, and even video chat, you can create a collective experience worth everyone's time.
Interested in strategizing how these trends can play a role in your outreach? Give us a call today.
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