 This 40-minute training on how to conduct effective online meetings was recorded during the Club Officers training for those Masters of District 20. Let's get started. Our next trainer has made an excellent use of the lockdown period to upgrade his own skills, his online skills as well as to support other members, clubs, areas, divisions and districts too. He has planned and executed several division contests and he played a key role at the DTAC and was also crowned the District 20 Toastmaster of the Year for 2018-2019. He has conducted several workshops that have been attended by Toastmasters community from around the world focused on Toastmaster branding and design. His latest passion is creating tech videos for Toastmasters to help us transition into the online world. Help me welcome Area 21 Director and Division F Director-Elect and recently crowned Distinguished Toastmaster Kajaton Bereto to train us on how to conduct effective online meetings. DTM Kajaton Bereto, you have 40 minutes to train us. The green screen will display at 30 minutes, yellow at 35 minutes and red at 40 minutes. The screen is yours. Thank you, Master of Ceremonies. How do we make an effective online meeting? But before we address that, I want all of you all to answer a very simple question and the question is, do you believe that online meetings are useful? The Master of Ceremonies is going to put up a poll on the screen now and I want you to answer this question from the bottom of your heart. Do you believe that online meetings add value to your Toastmaster journey to improve your leadership and communication skills? You have 30 seconds to answer this question for me. A large percentage of you have answered the poll and I must say, I'm not surprised at the result. The majority of you all believe online meetings are useful, but there is a section of you who don't believe in this. And I personally have come across members who have told me, look, I am used to standing in front of a stage. I like to use my body language. I like to connect with the audience. I want to see what they are feeling when I speak to them. And in an online meeting, my movements are restricted. I have to sit in one place and I have to look at the camera and I don't know what's the response I'm getting from the other side. So I don't believe in this online meetings. And the question again is, do you really believe online meetings are useful? And to answer that question, I want to share with you a small event that happened to me recently. In fact, it was on my birthday, June 18. Lot of happy birthday messages. But there was one message from one of my club presidents from area 21, Snehal 7. And her message was, hey, Eddie, I wanted to write this message to you. And what better day than to write this on your birthday? And I want to thank you. You see, Snehal was one of this person from the 15th person that you see on this, that has responded as no, that you don't find online meetings useful, as well as most of her club members, Bright Horizons. Now Bright Horizons is a very social club. And they like to meet. They like to engage. I believe Aditya Mohammed Salim was in one of their meetings at the same time that he was because they had a meeting today in the morning. And they like to meet. And they like to socialize. And the idea of meeting online just didn't vibe with them. As an area director, I reached out to Snehal and said, Snehal, let's meet. I will help you to do the online meetings. I will train you. And I did that. I called the members, I called the ex-com, I trained them, I enabled them. The first meeting, I created for them with my account and then gave my account to them and said, have used this account for your future meetings, still you're comfortable and want to subscribe with your own Zoom account. And today, Bright Horizons has some of the best fun meetings that I can see. And the club, which was struggling a few months ago, recently completed their journey as a president-distinguished club. Every meeting of theirs is well thought of, has a theme. But that is not why Snehal was thanking me. Not because the club has finished as president-distinguished. She wanted to thank me because a few days earlier, she conducted a Zoom webinar for the medical professionals in the Middle East. And she was so stoked about it that she could do it. And she told me, Kaji, if it was not for the Zoom meetings, if I had not had this experience, I would not have been able to take up this task. And that for me was a sense of online meetings. Friends, what has happened is the world has changed. I don't know when we will go back to our workplace next month or two months after. It will not be the same thing. If you are a salesperson, you may have to close your next sale looking into the camera and not meeting face-to-face with your customer. If you have to present your budget to the board, as I have to do next month, I won't be able to go to the boardroom and do it. Even if the lockdown is removed, they will insist that it is done online, whether it is on Zoom or Microsoft Team, that is immaterial. I will most likely present my budget sitting in this chair. And I have to have the skills to convince my board, perhaps to reduce my revenue targets because of the COVID-19 situation. And I can only do that if I have the online skills to deliver my message. So online is not just a temporary phase. Even if we meet in future, in the next few months, back to our meetings, online will form an integral part of our life at work with our families. The social distancing will remain in place till a vaccine for COVID-19 is found. And we need to adapt. And we in Toastmasters are in a wonderful position to help others. First our own members help them to become more effective in an online meeting, more effective to talk to the audience on the other side and also to attract new members who also want to understand how online works, how you need to look professional and we are in a good position to do that. So if you truly believe that online meetings are useful and is ex-com, you should because if you don't believe in it, you will not make them effective. My training will be of no use to you. So if, and I hope if I had run this poll again, I'm not going to do that. But if I did, I hope the percentage of no would go down. It might not be zero, but I hope it would go down. So if you believe that online meetings are useful, then let's learn how to make them effective. And to do that, let me switch to my other view that looks better. Perhaps some more light, beautiful. Now, a large majority of you all have already said that online meetings are useful. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to tell me one or two things that you think are the most important elements to make an online meeting effective. And how we are going to do that is I'm going to open the chat for everyone and in the chat box, please share with everybody. What are your two top priorities to make online meetings effective? You can type multiple answers and I know you can do it. You know it. Good network from president of Timber Talkers. Good light and sound system. I hope my light and sound system is good. Start with energy, I did, hopefully. Member participation, good environment, good attendance. Manolo says uninterrupted meeting, continuous, good background. Fantastic, you're all getting it. Timing, start on time, end on time. That doesn't change whether it's online or offline. We should stick to the same principle. Have an agenda and stick to it. Says Marta Steclow. Duraad President Ajee says connect from distance. Strong signal from Sindumal. Yes, you are also giving us a very strong signal about that because that's very important. Online meetings are effective. It has good network and good audio quality. Audio quality is paramount in a meeting more than the video. I totally agree. Toastmasters from all over the globe, we will debate about that. Professional appearance, like me, I'm wearing a suit. Meeting, reaching your place. We have wonderful joint meetings, more professional ways of presenting. So many of you have given excellent responses and now I will share my screen and we will start with the actual training session. Let me stop the chat. Any further questions as our master of ceremonies has mentioned, any specific questions to me or our previous trainer, please send her directly. The chat directly to the master of ceremonies and we will deal with them during our question and answer session. So how do we conduct online meetings? Most of the answers have already been given but let's recap them. Recap is always important. For me, I look at online meetings in four categories. And that is what can you as club officers do? Second, what is it that the members can do? What resources are available to you either from Toastmaster International or from the community? There are plenty of resources available for online meetings and I will finally share some tips and tricks with you to make your meetings effective. So what can the club officers do? First of all, you need to choose the right platform and by platform, I mean the technology that you're using to create your meetings, whether it is Zoom, whether it is Cisco Webex, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, all of these are platforms. And as Toastmaster International World Headquarters don't promote any particular platform. It is up to the club. The club has the final authority to choose their platform and even as a district, we cannot tell you use this but we can recommend to you because as of now, if you ask me as an expert who has been working on online meetings all this time and I use Microsoft Teams by the way at work all the time Zoom is still the gold standard when it comes to structured Toastmasters meeting. If something better comes, you can be sure I will let you know, the district will let you know but as of now Zoom is the gold standard. It has all the right tools to conduct an effective online meeting. You can still choose to use something else but this is my recommendation to you. Now, creating a meeting master is extremely important and this is what happened to Snehal Savant when she took up the role and said, I will learn this technology come what may. It helped her to become comfortable at work. So you should not be in a position that where only one or two people take over the Zoom account and say, I will do everything, I will start the meeting, I will create the polls and the knowledge stays with only one or two people. My recommendation to create effective online meetings is make sure that every club meeting a different person gets enabled, train the next person. It could be maybe the toast master of the day because he has to do a lot of organizing. So train that person to run the Zoom meeting. It is not only because he knows or he doesn't know, the objective is to enable, just like how we enable communication skills, enable the online skills for that person too and give them that opportunity to understand how polls work, how you can set up breakout rooms, how you can mute, unmute people, give them that experience of running an entire meeting. And one of the electives, by the way, in pathways is called how to conduct online meetings. So this member could take up that as a project and do it as a level three project, but give it an opportunity to each and every member, regardless of whether he's ex-com or not ex-com to understand and run a Zoom meeting. The third thing you need to do is you need to create buzz. But when I say buzz, online meetings allows you to reach a global audience, but as DTM Selim said, and I fully agree with him, you must as an ex-com decide what is in the best interest of your members. Many times what we do is we will bring, as DTM Selim said, celebrity speakers or top evaluators from around the globe, but what would happen is your members might get scared to sort of shine on such a stage. They may not approach to do their projects. Your members' projects are paramount, which means if you are in a club where the members need to be protected and nurtured and supported, then your buzz should be with your members only. Don't go for this joint meetings, don't go for this mega-events because those might give you the momentary sort of fame, but it's not adding value to your members. It's not adding to the DCP goals, and you need to achieve those six DCP goals. So the buzz that you create needs to have the right target audience. Decide whether you need to focus only on your audience or bring some experts in your meeting to give your members some tips and tricks, but don't overwhelm your members that they don't take up projects. Create agendas well in advance, as you mentioned in the chat, share it, all the links are available, and invites. It's not about sending a message in a WhatsApp group and saying our next meeting and so and so, no. You must send a personal invite, whether it is to your member or to your prospect, and it makes a difference. And we have resources available from those masters for that. I will show them to you. And finally, create a meeting that is immersive. What do I mean by immersive? It means that you don't log in to the meeting one minute before it starts. You create rehearsals. The Toastmaster of the day will plan and call all the role players one day before. So they see how it will work, how the sequence of the meeting will go, what PowerPoint presentations will be shown, how they look, is the sound okay? All the role players practice, rehearse, and then it becomes, as I said, on time and make sure all your audience members are immersed in it. That is what, as an ex-com member, is your role to create online meetings until we can stop and go back to our on-site meetings. What can the members do? Members also have a responsibility. And for the members, the first thing is to learn the technology. Many times we will find members coming in and saying, oh, I don't know how to share. I don't know how to unmute. And in the middle of the meeting, the moderators have to step in and to help members. And that creates not so effective meeting. So as members, you need to understand how the technology works. Reach out to your Zoom masters in the club who know this. Get yourself trained and understand how to log in, how to unmute yourself, how to unmute yourself. So that when you join the meeting, you are comfortable. You know what you are doing. As somebody said, join early and test your connection and equipment. It doesn't matter if you have done meetings 100 times. When I am doing a meeting as a participant or as a moderator, 15 minutes before my meeting will be on or I will be present. Why? Because I want to make sure that today the connection doesn't have any problem. Today I want to see that my camera doesn't have any problem or my software doesn't have any problem. But if you join one minute before, you don't have time to do all of that. And then it will either result in disruption of the meeting to help you deal with your problem or the meeting will get delayed. Come prepared for your meeting role. All the roles have well-defined scripts and actions that you can take. Make sure that you download the right script from Toastmasters International and make sure that you practice that script and deliver it. So whether it's a simple role as a timer, there's a timer script, whether you're a general evaluator, there's a general evaluator, keep it succinct to the point. Don't ramble on because then it becomes not so effective because people lose interest very quickly. You can hold the interest of your audience in an onsite meeting for quite some time because you are looking at them. But it's very easy and I'm sure many of you might even be switching your other devices, checking WhatsApp messages. So if you want to hold your interest, keep it short and sweet. It's very important that we follow meeting etiquette and what is meeting etiquette is like in today's meeting, the moderator has enabled that you can't unmute yourself. But in a normal meeting, everyone can and should unmute themselves as and when required. But you should know how to follow it. You should unmute yourself just when it is your time to speak and mute yourself once you're done talking. That is one part of it. The second is how you present yourself on the video because remember we are in the small box here and everything that we do, even something we touch, it is visible to all the audience. So be aware of what you look like on video. If you are in a very busy environment, if you have children running around, try to find a way that it is quiet and the video is not distracting to the audience or to the speaker. That is following meeting etiquette. And finally, take active part in the meeting. Take part in your table topics, take part in whatever role that you have given, take active part. And further details of this meeting tips are available on the TOSmasters website. I will share this presentation along with all the links and resources to you at the end. Feel free to download it to your PC and go through all of these resources. Let's look at some of the resources that are available to us. And the first resource I would like to highlight is the flyers for prospects and members. And I want to share the screen rather than the particular presentation. So I have downloaded a lot of resources and all of these resources, at least most of them are from TOSmasters website. And the first resource I want to show you is the flyers. The difference between sending an invite to your members by saying, posting in the WhatsApp group or saying a personal message, this is a meeting and sending a personal invite and why don't we make use of it? So the first is a member flyer. So this is the resource available from TOSmasters website. And I highly recommend you all make use of this resource, put your club name, put the meeting URL, the date, the time and your VP memberships email address and send it out by email as a personalized invitation to that member. Even though he is expected to come for the meeting, sending a personal invite like this adds a touch and it's your responsibility at XCOM to encourage and motivate members. And this is the first resource that you would use to invite your members. The second resource I would like to highlight is the resource for the prospects. There is a similar resource available from the TOSmasters website called the prospect. Similarly, it's the same thing, but it's slightly tailored for the prospect. Give the club name, the meeting URL, the date and the time and the VP memberships email. And basically the message is different. It says, learn how a 100 year old organization can help you. So they will come and join the meeting. So that is the flyers for prospects and members. What are the resources are available for us? Let's see. Zoom virtual background. Let's do a small exercise here. I want those who have a virtual background or can enable a virtual background. Please, can you all show me your virtual background? I want to see how many are capable of showing a virtual background. And beautiful virtual backgrounds. You can switch to your gallery view, by the way, to see the virtual backgrounds being demonstrated by different members. And virtual backgrounds is a great way for really making our meeting look effective and professional. And of course, I highly recommend that we use virtual backgrounds from TOSmasters as shown, used by DTM Khalid and Sukh, DD Waffa, Priscilla and who else, VPPR Meena. So virtual backgrounds have their pros and cons, by the way. And I'll just touch two or three minutes on them. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask Priscilla to, where is Priscilla? I will spotlight her video. And Priscilla is using virtual background. And before that, let me also change my virtual background. Now there is a slight difference between my virtual background and Priscilla's virtual background. And the difference is in my background, if I remove my virtual background, you will see, I have quite a busy kind of background. I'm in a normal room. But I'm still able to use the virtual background because I have a fairly powerful computer. And virtual background is nothing but computing. It tries to replace what is behind with a picture. And my computer is able to do that, but not all of your computers would be able to do that. And Priscilla's is an example of that. Her computer is not capable of replacing background so effectively. So what has she done? She has done something very simple. She has put, and if she removes her virtual background for a minute, we will see what she has done. As you can see, her background is a plain color and it's green. So if you have a wall like this grip, that's a perfect virtual background because green screen by itself is an element even Hollywood uses. You might have seen all the blockbuster movies of Superman and Batman. They're not actually flying in space. You'll see them on wires doing like this in front of a green screen. And then the computer technology replaces the green screen with whatever you want. In this case, a picture. But why is green screen important? Because green is a color, at least as I can see for Priscilla. None of her facial features are green. We don't have green in our skin tone. We normally don't wear green clothes. So that's the difference between green. Green is a color that is very rare as far as what we wear. So it's easy to replace. And green is considered a standard. But it's not necessary. You need a plain background, some proper light in front of you. But if she was wearing green, see what would happen. Let's say she wears a green t-shirt. Now, can you change the color first, the background? Is that not green, maybe? Yeah, it is. I have a green screen. So normally, if you use the same color, then what will happen is that color will disappear. So what you can do is, if you want to use this background that are available from the Toastmasters website, try to find yourself in a place that has a blank wall with some light in front of you. And you should be then able to use the virtual backgrounds. Some devices, you may not be able to use virtual backgrounds if your computing power is not good. But mostly, you should be able to. If you're using a phone, only note that virtual backgrounds work on iPhone 8 and above. If you're using Android phone, you can't use a virtual background. Let me go back to my sharing and see what other resources are available for us. So imagine if all the XCOM members have a virtual background like this. And this virtual backgrounds, by the way, are available from Toastmaster website also. You can find all of these virtual backgrounds. You can choose which one you like. I will give you the link to all of these virtual backgrounds. You can download them on your PC and feel free to try them out. Timer backgrounds. So if you want to do a timer role, then you can use the timer backgrounds. Again, these are available from the Toastmaster website. They look like this. Timer backgrounds, green, red, yellow. And even though green is not the palette color of Toastmasters, Toastmaster has created this for us. We can use it. It is official background if you are running a timer. And how do we do that? If you are a timer, what we can do is if I am a timer for this meeting, then what I would do is I would use virtual background, and I have this green, yellow, and red. And if I want to look even more professional and effective, then what I normally do is I will put a small cloth, which is here. I have the small cloth that I used to clean my glasses, black in color. So when I want to be a timer, I will simply place it in front of the camera. And now all you are seeing is the green screen. You don't have me as a distraction. And this looks really professional. So I have this green. When I reach the target time, I will change to yellow. When I reach the maximum time, I'll change to red. So these three colors or these three virtual backgrounds are available from the Toastmaster website. The link will be shared with you. Plus I have also created this virtual background myself. You can use download that also. This is when I'm not in the timing mode. If I just want to show my screen and I'm not actually at green, yellow, or red, then I can just show this as my virtual background so that everyone knows where is the timer. Easy to locate him. And the instructions are there. You should pin this video to ensure time is always visible. So that's the virtual backgrounds. Let me remove it. And there we go. What are the resources available for us? Digital certificates. This I have found very professional. Whenever I have used them in my meetings, especially in some of the global meetings, the members have been so attracted by it. Wow, can you share it with us? And this digital certificates, by the way, were created by our District 20. It is not from Toastmasters. This had been created by DTM Noor Muhammad. And he shared them for AllToastmasters to use. And they look like this. So the digital certificate for best speaker, best table topics, best evaluator. So the Zoom master, whenever he's running this meetings, what he can do is, sorry, I was not sharing, I think, my screen. Let me just go back to those certificates. The digital certificates appear like this. And what the Zoom master can do is, when the results are announced or before the results are announced, he can fill up the name of the person who won the best speaker, best table topics. And then, while announcing the results, show this digital certificates. And it adds a lot of value to the person who won that, rather than just saying his name in a meeting, actually displaying this digital certificate. And at the end of the meeting, the Zoom master can simply take this certificate and send it as an email to the winner. And he can keep it with him. So this is another way to make your meetings effective. And finally, on the Toastmaster website, there are plenty of how-to videos and some quick reads on making your meetings effective. In fact, yesterday, they just posted one new video on Toastmaster, the International YouTube channel, saying online meeting tips. And it is essentially a summary of what we are discussing here today, how to make your meetings, online meetings, effective. This is on their YouTube channel, Toastmasters International, posted just yesterday, just in time for this session of mine. And also, if you go to the Toastmaster International website and the home page, I hope the delay is not going to hamper us today, because they have a lot of activity happening today, you see, due to volume of members conducting near-run business, there could be delays. But let's hope so. So if you go under the COVID-19 coronavirus response, learn more. So here we have a section called online meetings. And I click on this. We can see, first of all, a lot of tools and resources for you as ex-commember. Please go through them. There are most of the things that I discuss here, for example, online meeting tips for club offices, what software is available and comparison of that. The prospect that I was talking about, the flyer, the flyer for the members, timer zoom backgrounds, digital ribbons, and some additional virtual backgrounds, zoom virtual backgrounds, best practices, or this is not applicable for the club. This is for online speech contest. In addition, we have a lot of how-to videos, okay? So specifically when it comes to online meetings, go through this, filling online meeting roles, seven tips for attending online meetings, and keep your club on track with online meetings. All of these are very useful resources created by Toastmasters International. And in addition, as I mentioned, there are some quick reads for you. And you can go through. So that is, as far as available resources, I will quickly go through some of the tips and tricks. We have a virtual applause and a countdown timer. And this can be used like how we are using in a meeting. And I will share this resource also with you. I have created this myself. We used it in the contest and all that. So if you want to, let's say the speaker has just finished giving a speech and you want to have a one-minute silence and a virtual applause, you can use this PowerPoint presentation where you can, for example, play the computer song. And when you go to the next slide, this slide, you can customize it based on your club needs. You can put, for example, your meeting dates and meeting times of the club. You can share some quotes. You can put some customized information about your club offices, how to reach you. All this information can be put. So during that one minute of silence while people are putting their notes for the speaker, they could also use this information to connect to you after the meeting. Okay, so that's the virtual applause and countdown timers. The next thing you have to do is you have to make sure that you secure your meetings. You make sure that people don't join your meeting and share inappropriate content. And there are several videos out there which can show you how to secure your meetings, how to prevent people from sharing while the meeting is going on, how to prevent people from unmuting themselves if you are in the middle of a speech. So for example, when the speaker is speaking, the moderator can go and say, don't allow anybody to unmute themselves so that the speech goes on without any interruption. So secure your meetings. If you have some special events like a special guest joining, learn how to stream it on YouTube, Facebook Live. This is very easy to do. And that will give you more reach to your club. Use feedback forms for members and guests. So create a Google form at the end of the meeting, send a form to them, get their feedback and learn from the feedback how to improve yourself. And as I mentioned at the end of the meeting, send a thank you note to all your guests. And if anybody has won any certificates of best speaker, best role player, mail them out to them so that they feel that they have achieved something by spending their time, their two hours in that meeting. So these are some of the tips and tricks to make your meeting effective and in an online meeting. If there are any questions, I will address them during the Q&A session. Feel free to think of any questions, how to make your meeting effective. Send the questions to the master of ceremonies and we will address them during the Q&A session. With that, I hand over to the master of ceremonies.