Moving to Hybrid Meetings

Our club like many others, is moving to a hybrid format - with some participants in room and some online. Other than the NOTES SECTION of the agenda does anyone have ideas on how we can indicate which meeting roles are filled by someone attending in room versus online?

Thanks in advance.
Midway Toastmasters 1990654

You, will need to explain to me what difference it makes to a role if the person is attending virtually or in person. They do the same role and are introduced the same way.

Hi Arlynn,

I am guessing that this is more for the Toastmaster's benefit than anything. Correct?

I imagine a situation where the Toastmaster is about to introduce someone and out of habit they look into the audience in the room and think the person is not in attendance in the meeting because they forget that the person might be attending virtually and there is nothing currently in place in the agenda to remind them. (other than something in Notes as you mention)

Am I guessing the situation correctly? If so, I think where we will likely end up in this discussion is an Improvement Suggestion to make the system better handle "use cases" involving hybrid meetings. There have been some other suggestions to make these types of enhancements--I will need some time to figure out what approach makes the most sense.

In the future, it will really help us understand your use case (specifically how you are trying to use the system in your situation) if you can describe it to us with some detail (including which system features you are using) and specifically how the system is falling short for your needs.

First the platform performs beautifully for us and is not lacking in anyway. We love FTH. Thank you for all that you have done for us.

The fundamental rule in a successful hybrid meeting is to make sure that both the live and the online audiences are engaged in every aspect of the meeting. That falls mostly, but not totally, to the Toastmaster. A few of our specific situations seen while trying to engage both audiences:

If the Toastmaster and votecounter are in different audiences then deciding how the results of Best-of voting will be communicated from votecounter to Toastmaster is one more item we wouldn't have to discuss immediately before the meeting if we know which audience each other will participate in.

Knowing ahead of time if the VPM is attending online allows the club to have someone in the live audience prepared to welcome inperson guests.

A smooth way to handoff transitions between online participants and inroom participants is to label them with their roles. Example “Our online speaker tonight” or “Please welcome to the inroom lectern,” etc. It gives inroom participants a clue about where to look for the speaker (the monitor or lectern). The Toastmaster would like to prepare in advance.

For prepared speakers, if the speaker is live and has a handout, the Techmaster must be prepared with the URL of the online version of the handout to share in a zoom CHAT, so the remote audience gets a copy. That takes time to set up.

Large tentcards are set out on tabletops by the SAA so that the remote audience can see the names of members/guests in the room. They'd like to be made in advance.

Prepared speakers using PowerPoint online is no problem but we need another laptop set up to run a PowerPoint in the room. Set up in advance.

In general, the way tables are set up in the room (so everyone can see the wall monitor) depends on how many inroom participants we anticipate that week.

Those are just the ones that come immediately to mind.

In my perfect world, the agenda button where the member selects attendance, "Yes/No" could have the options expanded to "Remote/InPerson". Everyone could look at the attendance list and plan accordingly.

Thank you.

Thanks for the use cases... these will help us a lot to understand your situations.

I understand updating the attendance functionality--this is something that Pam has also brought up. Another possible thing to additionally consider is having the names called out in the agenda as something like Joe Smith (online) or Joe Smith (virtual) or something like that for those members who have already responded that they would be attending virtually. What I am getting at here is that it is not so much that we cannot or will not do something like this... is just sorting out the best way to do it that only works for some clubs but causes issues for others.

ohhhh I do love having it called out next to the name!