GOAL & OBJECTIVES: To facilitate a meaningful group discussion that is engaging and helpful

Say, for example, your roundtable discussion wants to tackle a hot-button industry issue. Instinctively, we turned to our conference speakers to be moderators. How long will the roundtable activity run for? Instruct them to use the brief to encourage your attendees to speak and avoid answering their own questions.Give every attendee a copy of the agenda to keep them focused and informed. If you’re organising multiple groups from a variety of professional backgrounds, use your to personalise the experience for guests. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The Top News & Research in your Inbox SUBSCRIBE Interactive sessions are the future, be they roundtable, creative Q&A, or other novel formats. The host is likely paying for the event and they will have a reason for organising it. These are nicely self-contained. This is a quite likely scenario. Technology is a fantastic solution to this problem. Allow upvoting and comments so the people being asked can filter by relevance to the audience or dive further into topics by responding to comments in the thread.Questions can be really trivial or very challenging.This mix of silliness and meaning is what makes these sessions widely popular, but they also carry a lot of potential to deliver targeted, relevant content. This will help to avoid misunderstandings or vague answers.Roundtable discussion tip #7: Transcribe the conversationHave a staff member on hand to transcribe the major points and results of your roundtable discussion. The benefits are indisputable. While putting a personality, celebrity or performer in touch with your audience sounds like the ultimate idea, you really need to consider carefully whether this is the right move for your event.So let's have a look at 9 tips to make sure your interactive Q&A session is spotless:I can talk about #eventtech for hours. We love to think attendees share the same commitment and interest in sessions, but realistically they might only have decided to attend a few minutes before.You need to have some questions ready, in accordance with your speaker, that can serve as an ice breaker or safety net if few questions come in during the session.These can serve the purpose of explaining how the session is going to work. You need a very high degree of confidence with the subject to perform.Otherwise, speakers may try to divert the conversation at times, and attendees might bring the conversation back to pain points which can sometimes represent very difficult topics to elaborate in quick answers.Make sure your speaker is comfortable with the session, make sure that they are 100% on board and committed to make the most out of the experience.Moderators or MCs have a key role in the success of an interactive session. You get more questions in, which is a very good thing. Your roundtable discussion can be an engaging alternative to a keynote speaker. Lots of good can come out of them if handled correctly.If you are willing to see one in action, come see one of my talks. The complete lack of structure can confuse attendees.So you have your speaker ready for an amazing interactive session, all the attendees seated and excited, yet no questions are coming in. Find out what the host wants to achieve. It also reduces that 'Where am I?' This is one of the key reasons why formats like the unconference struggled to become mainstream. Roundtables are an ideal format for networking and in-depth discussion on a particular topic. Go for solutions that have effective modes for scheduling, registration, and engagement tracking to enable positive discussion experiences. Having someone from your team to summarize the answers you give on social media will help to digest what is being discussed and expand reach, involving remote audiences in the conversation. Can you share more tips? I never stop. In fact they were born this way. Also have some prepared on the tech platform you are going to use. Your attendees have left feeling invigorated by the conversation. With access to the experts, attendees can get targeted advice on their specific context, as opposed to a general address which has its evident limits.Not all that glitters is gold though. Do you need to break them into smaller groups? When I first started out organising conferences they weren’t the […] Using your website and most of all social media to communicate what you are trying to do is instrumental to the end result.This gives attendees the chance to prepare as well. A strong moderator can keep things on track and moving along if a discussion stagnates.So how do you select a moderator that will help your event shine? If your attendees came up with a solid plan, let them know how the information will be put to use and follow up with the results of any actionable outcome.How to run a successful conference or corporate eventA roundtable discussion is one piece of a much larger puzzle when planning a conference or corporate event. N. Appreciate people for their contributions to the discussion. Roundtable presentations typically include 15 minutes of presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion and feedback. But as they are becoming more important, we think it’s important to revisit some of the most common formats and the best practices for executing them.In this post, I wanted to share a few insights I’ve gained organising roundtables and other interactive sessions.What do we mean by a roundtable? If you have concurrent discussions at your event, assign a facilitator for each table and have a roving moderator. Connecting your speaker to the audience is actually a very good idea, regardless of what type of session you are running.Interactive Q&A sessions are not for the risk averse. At a minimum, send out an email with a compilation of all top transcribed points and answers reached by your groups. Me moderating a roundtable at Digital Cream Melbourne Before the day. Assess the title and companies of the attendees and try to create a spread of complementary skills across each group.

A roundtable discussion can be a meaningful highlight of your conference or corporate event. The idea is to break down the barriers between the audience and the speaker.