Later, printed worksheets. Sup, Google Slides.
How we use Google slides to facilitate collaborative workshop exercises
In March, our team at People & Company hosted our last in-person workshop for the foreseeable future. There are many things I miss about jamming in the same room: gathering around a table, sidebar conversations, collective laughter. But you know what I don't miss? Printed worksheets. 🙃
We kicked off April with our first virtual "Get Together Foundations" lab. This is our two-day masterclass we've designed over the past year that helps team members across a company level-set on what it means to build a community and craft visions for communities they might invest in creating. We bring relevant case studies, facilitate discussion and tease out ideas through exercises. We used to fly in to client offices run this lab in-person. And we now had to adapt our materials for virtual facilitation.
For this particular lab, we brought together 15 designers, marketers, and PMs at well-known online marketplace. Amidst the pandemic, the team was trying to figure out how they might enable their community of buyers to better support one another.
While our previous strategy sessions employed the kitchen sink of creative materials—printed worksheets, post-its, and flip chart paper—this time, to go virtual, we went all-in with Google Slides.
Why use Google Slides to build worksheets? Because it's familiar (enough) to most people.
I've participated in a number of online "jam sessions," and there are lots of neat tools popping up. From collaborative whiteboards like Miro to prototyping tools like Figma.
However, as a strategy company that provides client services across many industries—we're better off using "common" tools. Tools that are familiar to both a product team as well as nonprofit leaders. We remove friction if our tools are approved by most IT departments—or at least make it easy enough to adapt to teams that must use other tools.
So, Google Slides isn't perfect nor approved by every client (more on that later!)—but for now we've found that they're the least common denominator. They're widely used and require less onboarding.
A few other benefits to note:
Google Slides are visual and collaborative in real time. A small group can drop in photos, links, and text simultaneously.
Quick edits are simple enough (especially compared to a PDF worksheet.) Any of my team members can correct a typo without having to re-export or open design software.
These worksheets can be updated live. If we decide to make a last minute change based on new information, no prob.
Packaging up final deliverables is a breeze (i.e. we don't have to decipher people's handwriting or sort through mangled sticky-notes.) The output from our workshops is closer in fidelity to our wrap-up delivarbles.
Saves on paper. Take that printouts! 🌎
So, how do we create Google Slides worksheets?
The main tip is to use Master Slides for information that should not be edited by participants (e.g. worksheet instructions) and use normal slide elements for what should be edited. If you haven't used Master Slides, they're essentially a templating feature. Usually, you add elements to a Master Slide that you want to show up on multiple slides (e.g. page numbers, company logo). Then you apply that Master Slide layout to particular slides.
In this case, we create a Master Slide for each worksheet to simplify what participants can click on and interact with. For example, here's a worksheet for an exercise we call "Order the Order of Operations." It's a warmup to help teammates start thinking about the steps involved in building a community and where they are in the process.
For this exercise, we give a group of 3-4 people five minutes to order the community-building steps by dragging and dropping the text-boxes.
We created a Master Slide that includes the headings, instructions, and other background elements (e.g. the dotted rectangles). And we kept the text-boxes with our steps as movable and editable. You can see there's even a wildcard box to "Create your own" step.
Here's what the Master Slide looks like and you can view a sample of this Google Slides worksheet here (Note: that's an open slide deck deck. Edit responsibly🙂.)
Bringing in visuals
For generative exercises, we leave more whitespace in our worksheets. Here's a worksheet where lab participants describe an idea they have for a new community shared activity.
We leave editable text-boxes for the idea name and description. We also encourage folks to paste in visuals. Bonus: Google Slides supports animated gifs.
A few more tips for creating these worksheets
Test your worksheets, at least by yourself. Type in them. Try them out. You'll find that you want to change font size in certain text-boxes and make other edits so the experience of filling out these worksheets and moving things around is seamless and considered. You can even use comments or speaker notes as additional tool-tips.
Package up multiple worksheets (slides) into a single "workbook." We usually create one shared slide deck workbook per workshop. Even if we're working together for multiple days, it's nice to have one link to keep pointing participants to. This is where you need to go! ⛳️
Iterate on your worksheet template. I usually review our Google Slides workbook after each client engagement to see what worked and didn't. Did we provide enough space in the text-boxes for our participants to flesh out their ideas? Did people use the worksheets in ways I didn't expect? I then leave comments to myself in the template file for revisions to consider next go-around.
Other questions you might have percolating...
What if a client can't use Google Slides?
We've been there! We've worked with government agencies that purely work in Microsoft Office. Our approach has been to export Powerpoint versions of the workbook that participants can download and fill out on their own. (Tip: in this case, you probably want to use system fonts like Arial in your slide design so your slides don't break.)
How many people can collaborate at once?
The max number of people we've tested these worksheets with is 50 during our lab with ambassadors from The Communications Network two weeks ago. (Shout out to those comms professionals, you were awesome and your community groups are lucky to have you as leaders!).
In that case, I think we pushed the live collaboration in Slides to its limit. 😬 None of our participants experienced lag issues but I had trouble refreshing the deck and received an error message from Google about the high traffic in our slide deck.
Flexibility ftw
One of the philosophies we have about process at People & Company is to prioritize flexibility. As a small team, we like to avoid time-sucks like re-creating materials from scratch. Hence, when there's a flexible option—a way to easily make updates on the fly or a tool that most of our clients and collaborators already know, we'll go for it.
Finally, what was surprising about this process of adapting our in-person facilitation and materials to a virtual setting? For one, some of what we do is better now. Some of the outputs from our workshops are more useful. There's less "waste." Some of our exercises have better scaffolding...
Flexibility frees us up to address trickier challenges at hand. And I'm proud of how our team has addressed this one.