Facilitating an interactive hybrid brainstorming session with 200 people

The challenge: facilitate a hybrid ideation session with 200 participants

In 2020, during lockdown, employees in SIG's Customer Service Department in Switzerland could no longer use their everyday work tools. They were used to having face-to-face group brainstorming sessions as a team using physical whiteboards. So, to keep in touch and continue to collaborate effectively remotely, they identified Klaxoon as the ideal tool to suit their needs.

Sophie’s team serves 228,000 customers throughout the region, whom it supplies with water, gas, electricity and thermal energy. When the project manager had to organize a hybrid brainstorming session about the climate pact with 200 participants, she immediately thought of Klaxoon and its dedicated teamwork tools.

The climate pact is a commitment made by SIG to accelerate energy transition and reduce CO2 emissions based on three cornerstones: exemplary GIS, committed GIS and enabling GIS.

It was a daunting task. Sophie had to facilitate this ideation workshop for remote and face-to-face participants, while ensuring there was enough participation for as many ideas and actions as possible to be collected and implemented.

The solution: Sophie launched a Session and a Board to engage participants and encourage participation

Streamlining team workshops

For the brainstorming session to be effective, Sophie created a Session: a Klaxoon activity to facilitate sequenced and interactive meetings, sharing presentation boards, while boosting live participation. This Session was punctuated by votes to sound out participants, and a Board, a limitless collaborative whiteboard with countless features. The goal was to provide a shared workspace, bringing people together both face-to-face and remotely.

From wherever they happened to be, the 200 participants can exchange ideas and interact in real time on the topic of the climate pact. As the facilitator, Sophie can centralize all the suggestions that come up during the session in one place, and sort the ideas on the go, to avoid duplication.

Starting with an icebreaker to take the temperature

To create a pleasant working environment and get to know the group, Sophie started the session with an icebreaker. She sent a Question to take the temperature of the participants, asking them to identify with a song that best represents how they're feeling. In one click, Sophie can also measure the progress of participants, by sending them a Question to find out if they’ve watched the relevant videos, sent to them before the brainstorming session.

Using each other's ideas to boost collective intelligence

Sophie cut straight to the heart of the matter with a presentation about the climate pact. The 200 participants joined the shared Board for some group brainstorming, with the following questions as a starting point: “Do you know about the climate pact?”; “What can we do to bring it life?”; “How can we play a role?” Individually, everyone sent their ideas to the Board and placed them in one of three categories: enabling, exemplary or committed ideas.

The result: 300 ideas collected, and improved efficiency

By organizing the workshop using Klaxoon tools, Sophie gathered 300 ideas about the climate pact along with actions to be implemented, and that’s not counting duplicates. At the end of the workshop, Sophie collected feedback easily, using an evaluation Question sent to the participants. They could give a score ranging from one to five. Session and Board are tools that work well for brainstorming sessions of this size, with some people face-to-face and others joining remotely.

Using Categories, Sophie can quickly sort ideas by themes, which makes it easy to allocate the various actions, depending on whether they are going to be implemented individually or collectively. She can also easily extract data from her Board in Excel to visualize the results of her brainstorming session in another format.

Finally, Sophie managed to engage 200 participants, in a hybrid session, on the subject of the climate pact thanks to Klaxoon. For her as a project manager, there are numerous benefits:

• Everything is centralized in one place.
• Visual management helps to see the ideas put forward more clearly.
• Data extraction options save time.
• Participants can be identified by a pseudonym, which facilitates interaction and means they can be asked questions at any time.
• This format is popular: the feedback is positive.

Do you want to try out Klaxoon's suite of tools too? Organize brainstorming sessions easily with the free and ready-to-use templates such as World Café, Brainstorming and Affinity Clustering available in the Klaxoon library, and try out Session to boost live participation.