Conducting a workshop is the best way to share your knowledge and expertise with your community. It provides you with the opportunity to network with people of similar interests. It also brings in opportunities for future engagement and collaborations. But it is not an easy task.
Hosting a workshop for the first time comes with its challenges. When you’re running a workshop, you’re dealing with a range of people with different skills, knowledge, and experience. You’re not only providing a learning environment, but you’re also providing a platform for people to exchange knowledge amongst themselves also.
If you want to get the most out of your workshop, avoid making these common mistakes and watch how your workshop performs.
Being underprepared
If you’re not sure what you’ll cover in your workshop, you’re already a step behind. It’s best to start preparing for a workshop with a clear outline of what you’re going to cover. However, it’s important to remember that when you start to plan a workshop, you should start with the end goal in mind. What are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to teach? What do you want the participants to walk away with? If you don’t know what you’re going to cover, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
So it is important to have defined goals and objectives to conduct a webinar. Next, in order to achieve those objectives, you need to draft the webinar content in advance. Craft the content in a way that you convey every message you want your peers to know from your expertise in the most engaging way. Make sure the flow of your content is no less than storytelling. Define the problems you must be facing and slowly give solutions to those problems.
Once your content is ready, start preparing your mindset. It will be tough for a few to present before people. So practice presenting your content a few times with the cameras on. Check on the gadgets and gears you are using to conduct the webinar. This will reduce your last-minute tensions.
Be prepared to answer your participants’ doubts and questions from your presentation. And also, be ready to accept the feedback and be open to listening to criticisms.
Not testing the content
If you are not testing your content, you will not know how well our audiences are receiving what you have to offer. It will shut down opportunities to improve your webinar, resulting in mediocrity.
Before hosting your main webinar, you need to test your content by hosting a mock webinar with a few participants. While building your content, start from scratch (outline) and make it into an easily understandable presentation. It will help you make sure what exactly you will be teaching your participants.
Conducting a mock webinar will let you know how effectively and fluently you convey your message across. Receive feedback and make necessary changes to enhance your content. Record the mock webinar and watch it. It will help you improve your presentation skills. You will also know how engaging you are and your content is while carrying out the webinar.
Trying to do too many things
If you try to do so many things in the very first workshop, there’s a good chance you’ll mess things up. Take on a single concept and try to address that in depth. Trying too many things and oversharing information will make it hard for yourself and your audience to grasp it. It might make your audience feel like information is being dumped on them in a brief timeframe. Stick to your workshop objective and give only the required information.
Not catching a standard language tone
As we already mentioned, you will be dealing with a range of people with different skills, knowledge and experience. So you need to find a standard language tone and dialect that will be easy for your audience to catch up with and give out the message easily.
If you use too much jargon and technical terms, your audience might feel overwhelmed and lose interest.
Not providing enough resources
Always provide necessary resources and handouts to your audience. It is an essential tool to help your participants understand the message and convey it to them efficiently. It will act as the study material that will help them remember the information gathered in the workshop for a long time. If you don’t provide the necessary handouts and resources, it will be hard for the participants to follow your presentation and track it.
If you are a content creator and want to monetise your skill-set and offer something unique to your community, TagMango is the simplest and the best tool to host workshops. You can conduct highly interactive workshops, both live or recorded workshops, and have the option to make it a paid or a free workshop.
So when conducting a workshop, avoid these common mistakes and have a fantabulous workshop! If you need any help or tools to get started and conduct your workshop effortlessly, sign up to TagMango and get in touch with us.
So come CREATE with us.
