Organizing a seminar: in five easy steps

What is a business seminar? Why organize a business seminar and how to go about it.

Seminars are key events that promote corporate culture and team building through workshop participation

A business, division, department or business unit seminar brings together all the teams within a company to take part in workshops, work meetings, brainstorming sessions, and to socialize. During this type of event, generally held over half a day, a day or several days, teams can step back and look at their work in a new light.
Why organize a seminar? To share objectives, and remind everyone of the corporate strategy and values. It’s also an opportunity to develop team building, a key performance factor for companies.

Seminars can also be tied in with other events:

• virtual seminars, online seminars or webinars
• management and business seminars
• induction, training, motivation and team building seminars

The “Organizing a seminar” template features all the tools you need to easily prepare and run all your seminars, regardless of their format, whether online or in person, in-house or elsewhere.
This article covers best practices on how to guarantee the success of your event in five easy steps. The first two steps involve setting up and designing the seminar as a team. The next three steps focus on the event itself and interaction with the participants. You can use the same tool and interface: Board, to set up the seminar and invite participants to take part on the day!

Step one: determine the seminar’s objectives and setting

Like any event, to be successful, a seminar requires good logistics. First of all, you need to spend some time working out what you want to achieve through your workshop. Run through the following questions to identify the most suitable format:

• What values do you intend to highlight?
• What will be the general tone of the event?
• What topics will participants discuss and focus on?
• What content will be shared with the attendees?
• What are the key messages that you want people to take away?

Want an easy way to pick people’s brains? Invite the organizing team to share a Board, a simple tool that facilitates visual cooperation in one place. You can answer these questions all together, vote for the best ideas and determine the seminar’s key objectives. Is everyone working remotely? With Live, the built-in video conferencing tool, you can interact with other users during your meetings and work sessions.

• When are you going to organize the business seminar? When is the ideal time?
• Where will the seminar take place?
• Will it be entirely online or will some people be on site and others attending remotely?
• What budget is allocated to the seminar?

The setting and formats must be in line with the seminar’s objectives. For the seminar’s logistics, you can also use the “Sketch my Project” template, which provides a visual representation of your to-do list and helps you work as a team in sync.

Step two: select your attendees

Start actually preparing your seminar, step by step, and organize your workshops in advance with the “Organizing a seminar” template.

• Start your Board and add your seminar program, with a precise time schedule. Participants will have access to all practical information in one place. It can be updated in real time if required.
• Customize the areas with the toolbar and items available: photos, shapes, text, drawings, links to videos and documents, etc. Take your time, make the Board your own and customize it to reflect your corporate identity! Want to start the seminar with a team icebreaker, before covering the program? To show this visually, you can unlock and move the area in question. Need to enlarge the “Messages and questions box” area? All you need to do is to resize the rectangle in question. Need more tables to adapt the breakout groups to the number of attendees? Just select a table and copy-paste it.
• Set up your workshops: hackathons, design thinking, brainstorming, agile management workshops, etc. Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, Speedboat, World Café methods, etc. You will find all these team-based workshop ideas to meet your seminar’s objectives in Klaxoon’s off-the-shelf template library. Open the templates, adapt them to your needs and post the links to these Boards onto your seminar Board. Participants can then navigate between the seminar Board and the workshop Boards. The ultimate aim is for everyone to feel engaged throughout the seminar!

Participants have access to the same content in the same place: workspaces are ready to welcome breakout groups and are accessible with one click. No more wasting time, when people don’t know where to click or where to go, etc. When it’s time for the breakout groups, people are either already allocated to a group or else invited to join a table, using their computer, tablet or smartphone, posting their picture and dragging it to a seat. That way, everyone can immediately see who they’re working with and can easily join them. For those taking part remotely, just add a link to the Board or a video conferencing room.

Step three: define your budget and make forecasts

One workspace for all your workshops and presentations: once your Board is up and running, invite seminar attendees via a link or by sending them a code. Use the Board’s built-in video conferencing tool, Live, for up to 15 people working together, even remotely. For groups of more than 15, use another video conferencing tool for the seminar. The Board is a single workspace where everyone can interact, share information and brainstorm throughout the seminar.

With Synchro Board, everyone can focus on the same item: with one click, activate the Synchro Board and zoom in on one area of the Board to share your screen with all the participants simultaneously. This is useful when presenting the day’s program and activities for the online seminar.

An unlimited space to manage as many breakout groups as you need: throughout the seminar, you can organize plenary sessions or breakout sessions according to the schedule. With Board, you have an unlimited workspace and a set of graphic tools, so feel free to customize your seminar to fit your company’s image and find ideas in the ready-to-use template library! You’ll find turnkey workshops and tips to prepare and run your business workshops.

Step four: set up your workshop in a few clicks

Browse from Klaxoon's template library, and make your pick!

Step five: running the seminar smoothly

Icebreakers are ideal to start a seminar and “break the ice”: these simple and efficient workshops are perfect to allow everyone to speak their mind, arouse curiosity, get people to know one another and set the team to work, whether in a room or remotely. The “Organizing a seminar” template features ready-to-use icebreaker templates that you can copy-paste in the dedicated area or on a different Board if you plan to work in separate teams.

Step six: keep everyone engaged

The “Organizing a seminar” template also features an area derived from the “Breakout Rooms” template, to divide participants into subgroups very easily. You’ll find other areas that you can use for workshops facilitation, feedback and feedback sharing sessions. As in a room-based seminar where you move from one room to the next depending on the program, Board keeps your seminar lively and visually attractive. Even online, everyone can follow the day’s proceedings and contribute by posting ideas with text, images, videos, web links, etc.

You can use the Questions tool at any point during the seminar. Ideal for addressing others, boosting communication within the group, taking decisions as a team: everyone can easily interact and take part, even remotely. Plain questions, tests, multiple choice questions or polls: Question is a quick and easy way to pick participants’ brains, according to your needs.

After a busy day of presentations, workshops and brainstorming sessions, how can you make sure that those present will remember key takeaways? Whether it is an annual review, statistics, objectives for the coming year, key information is shared with the attendees throughout the seminar. Creating synchronous interaction helps boost information sharing sessions and helps this information to sink in. Klaxoon can help support this process throughout the seminar!

You can then use Klaxoon’s Adventures or Assignments to test attendees on what they have learned from the seminar and invite them to share their feedback. The Board used for the seminar can also remain available for everyone to refer back to their exchanges and shared contents. Getting attendees to remember key information is a true challenge, which also depends on their seminar experience. The “Organizing a seminar” template has dedicated areas for feedback and sharing. “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”: collect as much feedback from participants as possible to boost the performance and popularity of your team sessions!

Ready to start on a new adventure with the “Organizing a seminar” template? Browse our tips and instructions and make the Board your own to make your event unique and true to your company values, with plenty of sharing and interaction!

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Get our template and start organizing your seminar now!