5 Winding down, reflection and continuation

The focus of our guide so far has been on the main elements of online event planning and design process. This section entails many different questions, inspiring approaches and considerations, including strategic archiving processes, continuing the conversation, evaluation forms design, post-event care activities, new learnings and reflections on the overall process, creating new resources, etc. We will be working on this section in the future and our plan is to add it in the next edition of this guide. However, here are some of the threads that we imagine could be included.

Winding down, reflection and continuation

Evaluation / follow up / lessons learned

You would want to collect feedback, insights from everyone who was involved, participants as well as organizers - as this is the best way to learn what worked and what can be improved or adjusted. This can be done in various ways. You can dedicate part of your closing sessions to collect these insights. You can also organise and distribute an online survey for people to fill in after the event. There are so many different ways how people can share how it felt for them to participate, perhaps creating an illustrated story about the event, such as TBTT Global meet: Nepal; An Illustrated Journey with Questionable Accuracy / A Love Letter to the Gathering. This example portrays and collates all the visual and textual documentation of the event.

Remember that your participants need some time to rest, pause and digest what happened during your event. This especially applies to your team, as you were involved from the beginning. Plan for team reflections either in the form of a survey or real time conversations where you will collectively review the entire process and all of the segments: your internal communication, technology and challenges assessment, lessons learned. If you have documented your event, that this will also help your learning and evaluation.

Keep the connection and conversation going

Once your event is over, keep the conversation around the event ongoing. Most of your participants will still be online, and issues that were discussed during the event continue to matter, both in offline and online world. Use the energy of your event as your inspiration. Use the same hashtag / key word to share recordings of the event, post-event insights, resources, questions or any other materials. You can also use post-event additional time to adjust the entire material so that is it more accessible.

Systematizing the value of your event for your team and community use

After all of the hard work and commitment both from the team and your participants, the content of your online event can be turned into beautiful learning material for the world and also your own team. Think of the segments you can further use in the form of discussions, documents, images, illustrations, video, etc. Some options would also be developing videos, books, news articles, etc. Save all of the documents you’ve created in the process and start building your own pool of materials and resources that you can further develop and share within your community and beyond.

Resources, tools and our bucket reading list

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