5 Tips For Maximizing Virtual Business Town Hall Meetings

Town Hall meetings are a unique opportunity for businesses. Their main purpose is to facilitate a dialogue between the top levels of an organization and everyone else, helping to build trust and loyalty, motivate teams to meet the challenges of the future, and improve the bottom line.

While Town Halls have the potential to provide many benefits, they can present many challenges too. These meetings are complex undertakings, especially when held online with teams that are dispersed across countries and time zones. Here are five tips for maximizing your next virtual Town Hall from your PowerPoint presentation design experts at eSlide:

1. Generate Excitement Before the Event

Town Hall meetings should be an interactive event, not a one-way presentation. So, it’s important to empower everyone to participate and contribute right from the start.

To generate interest and excitement around your virtual Town Hall, it’s helpful to organize some pre-event publicity. Design and disseminate an agenda that tells attendees what to expect, who will be speaking, and how they can participate in the conversation.

Giving your Town Hall a design theme or specific branding will help amplify the meeting’s importance. These visual signifiers can be included in pre-event materials such as the invitations and agenda and threaded throughout the event on the PowerPoint presentation design and follow-up materials.

2. Reinforce Company Culture Through PowerPoint Presentation Design

Town Hall meetings are an organization’s chance to tell its story and gel its company culture. But when it isn’t held in-person, it can be difficult for attendees to feel connected to the whole. Effective PowerPoint presentation design is a good way to reinforce corporate vision, mission, values, strategies, and priorities, beyond explicitly stating what they are.

Good design can communicate the ethos of an organization, including where it wants to go and how it plans to get there. Coupled with the open, honest discussion of the Town Hall format, well designed presentations and meeting materials can help boost positivity and participation and align thinking.

3. Give Presenters a Head Start

Presenting at a Town Hall meeting can be a daunting task. With so much depending on the outcome of this meeting, it’s critical that presenters have the tools they need to succeed.

Experienced meeting planners know that a key part of event prep includes providing schedules and deadlines for presenters’ PowerPoint presentation design. Here’s more on this from one of our previous blogs.

Your Town Hall design theme and/or branding will be an important part of each presenter’s slide deck. Templates incorporating these visual elements should be created and distributed to all presenters well in advance to avoid last-minute technical problems.

4. Facilitate A Productive Dialogue

A Town Hall meeting should be a dialogue between company leadership and employees. For many organizations they offer a unique chance for employees to ask questions and voice concerns to leadership.

To get this aspect of a Town Hall right, it’s a good idea to do some question prep before the event. Polls can be a useful way to collect questions in advance and anonymously if desired. The results of a poll can be included in the presenter’s PowerPoint presentation design, enabling them to refer to universal areas of concern.

Should a presenter opt to take questions on the day, it’s advisable to have some dedicated moderators on hand to help things go smoothly. They can collect and compile questions thematically for presenters to address, or even record questions for offline follow up if there are too many to address live. This ensures that the Q&A doesn’t get off track or disrupt the overall flow of the meeting.

5. Test Technology

For virtual meetings with large audiences, it’s important to test every aspect of the technology to be used in advance. This is a vastly different project than running a 10-person Zoom call. If you want to avoid glitches and surprises, make sure everyone involved in the event has participated in rehearsals during which all technology is tested.

Bonus Tip: Enlist Professional Advice

Enlist assistance from professionals to make sure your Town Hall meeting is the best it can be. eSlide can help with all your PowerPoint presentation design needs, including custom templates, professional design, and production. We’ve been working with top executives from Fortune 500 companies around the globe for more than 20 years.

Get in touch with eSlide today to speak with a member of our team to ensure your Town Hall event is low-stress and gets the results you need.