Rotary Online Best Practices: A Guide to Hosting Hybrid Club Meetings

Part 2: Meeting Structure

1. Assign a Meeting Coordinator: Having an individual assigned to be the meeting coordinator is a critical component to help bridge both an in-person audience with a virtual audience. The Meeting Coordinator needs to be physically present at the meeting venue, and also connected to the virtual meeting at all times. Their responsibility is to make sure to be the communication bridge between the in-person host team and the virtual host team. Your Meeting Coordinator should be intimately familiar with your virtual platform, and have their own devices (i.e. laptop) with them to connect to it. This ensures one person is responsible for making sure that the virtual audience’s voice is heard.
2. Assign a Meeting Host or Master of Ceremonies: The meeting host generally should be physically in-person at the meeting. This person will run the entire meeting, with the assistance of the Meeting Coordinator and Virtual Facilitator. The Meeting Host’s main job is to make sure the meeting moves along as scheduled.
3. Assign a Virtual Facilitator: A Virtual Facilitator helps to engage the remote audience with additional conversations, as well as serves the secondary role of providing technical support to remote attendees when needed. This can be especially helpful for any periods of time when the in-person audience needs to take a recess, has any in-person networking time, or is having a food or drinks break. Your Virtual Facilitator should be comfortable with the Breakout Rooms feature and have some virtual icebreaker exercises ready. If possible, consider also assigning someone to be the Assistant Virtual Facilitator in case your first facilitator has connections issues.
4. 1-on-1 Hybrid Catch-up: Set aside 10 minutes of your meeting to allow for your in-person attendees to catch-up 1-on-1 with at least one other virtual attendee, by opening up your Breakout Rooms within Zoom, and encouraging each in-person attendee to connect using the Zoom App on their personal smartphone.
5. Designate Time for Virtual Breakout Rooms: There will be a desire for attendees who are physically at your venue to want to naturally connect with others who are there in-person with them. Consider creating structured times during the meeting schedule for organic networking time. During this networking time, have your Virtual Facilitator open up Breakout Rooms and have your virtual attendees go into smaller groups to catch-up. This provides a networking opportunity for both audience groups, to make sure the virtual audience is not just sitting there and waiting while the in-person audience group is networking.
6. Actively Acknowledge Individuals: Build into your meeting schedule structured opportunities to verbally acknowledge both in-person attendees and virtual attendees. This will help both sets of attendees feel connected, and feel like they were seen. Acknowledging individuals can be as easy as verbalizing someone’s comment in the chat or celebrating someone’s personal success.
7. Personalized Attendee Follow-ups: Depending on the size of your audiences and meeting structure, it may not be possible to always give every person time to speak or to be recognized during the meeting. The last thing you want is for your attendees to feel invisible. Consider one to five individuals who are responsible for sending a personalized “Great to see you!” message to your virtual and in-person attendees during and after the meeting. Ideally, the individuals handling the follow-ups rotate per meeting, so that every time a repeat attendee visits, they get the impression that they are seen by others.

Part 3: Anticipating and Adapting to Challenges

1. Scenario: The internet connection at your meeting venue crashes or becomes unstable. Having a dedicated virtual host helps ensures your virtual audience is being taken care of even if the internet becomes unstable or unavailable at your in-person meeting venue. As an extra redundancy, it would be best practice to have both a primary virtual host and a backup virtual host can help in case there are any internet connection issues with your primary host, your backup virtual host can step in.
2. Scenario: Zoom (or your video conference tool) fails or is unavailable. Just like your computers or local internet has a chance of failing, all digital services — including video conferencing tools — have a chance to fail or become unavailable. Having the contact information for all of your meeting attendees to be able to send out an urgent real-time message can be important in the event you need to quickly provide a status update or make an announcement. Having your preferred communication method setup in advance — such as an email list of all attendees or a text messaging service that can reach all of your attendees— makes a huge difference when you are busy putting out fires.
3. Scenario: Your meeting venue becomes unavailable or it is no longer possible to meet in-person. Being flexible is a critical component to being successful in a hybrid meeting setting, and that includes being able to have a plan of action if you no longer can meet in-person. If it is just a meeting venue issue, do you have a backup meeting venue that meets all of your requirements and has the required internet and audio-visual setup? As a backup, are you able to quickly transition the meeting to a fully remote, online meeting instead — especially knowing that you already have a virtual audience that is committed to attending?
4. Scenario: Your meeting host’s computer or tablet fails or becomes unavailable. Have backup devices for the computer or tablet devices you are using for both audience engagement and for video/audio streaming. It is best when these backup devices are already powered on, connected, and ready to be swapped in. That will help ensure minimal delay in keeping the show running, in the event of a disruption.
5. Scenario: You have too many people either virtually or in-person. Unless your meeting requires registration in advance, it is sometimes difficult to know if you are going to unexpectedly hit your meeting capacity. What if your meeting is too popular? For the in-person component, do you have additional space to accommodate more people? For the virtual component, does your video conference tool — such as Zoom — have the upgraded account license to allow for more people? These are components to research, as upgrading meeting capacity is a different process for every tool. While this may be a positive scenario to have too many people, it is important that you have done your research and are prepared in the event you hit your original capacity limits. It is also important to note that as you scale up with more attendees, many video conference tools like Zoom impose other limitations. For example, the maximum number of breakout rooms in Zoom Meeting scales down the more attendees you have on — and breakout rooms stop functioning once you have 500 or more attendees on your Zoom Meeting, unless you have special permission granted in advance from Zoom Support.
6. Scenario: Technical issues and all other delays. Remember the last time you were in an online or in-person meeting and there was a technical issue or delay waiting for someone? It happens all the time. While you may not be able to prevent all delays, it is important that your meeting facilitators — both the virtual and the in-person ones — are ready to quickly adapt. Having backup voice-only presentations, icebreakers, jokes, and conversation-starters ready to be used can help make sure an unexpected delay is a positive moment. If the meeting host is not comfortable with improvisation, then it might make sense to recruit someone who is great at impromptu to be the meeting’s designated assistant emcee or assistant host.