Resources
Blog
Insights on events, technology, and the future of gathering
Latest articles
Insights on events, technology, and the future of gathering
Quick answer: To transform a virtual kick-off event, invite multiple speakers instead of one, put your decision makers in the hot seat for live Q&A, run team challenges in breakout rooms, alternate presentations with casual networking breaks, and add gamified competition with a leaderboard and prizes. An all-in-one event platform keeps every activity in one place.
With remote and hybrid work here to stay, virtual event platforms and digital tools have become instrumental in maintaining team cohesion and collaboration. Yet managers are still left puzzled about how to communicate company goals and engage employees at the same time. Will a simple Zoom meeting suffice? What team building activities can you run online? If you are looking for inspiration, here are five ideas to motivate and engage your team with a virtual kick-off.
A kick-off gets far more engaging when the stage is shared. If you are used to solely having the big boss up on a live stream telling everyone how excited he is for the coming year, you can already picture Carl switching his mic and video off in the top right corner. The truth is, people want to hear from different voices. Invite additional speakers to share their experiences and how they run things with their teams, and don’t forget the odd CTO - the tech enthusiast who cracks a couple of awkward jokes usually gets the crowd going.
Time zones are no longer an obstacle either: far-flung executives can upload a video recording that you simply add to your presentation. The key is to maximize your reach with the digital tools you have - invite more speakers and let them help you get the right message across to your audience.
While you have your leaders up on screen, reverse the roles and make them do some of the hard work. Challenge the decision makers of your organization to answer the hot topics live. As they share the stage, your audience can interact and ask questions that can be upvoted or downvoted, make them comment on live polls, or simply react with emoticons when one of them slips up.
During one event held on the Canapii platform, teams were asked to bet on their performance with different departments for the upcoming quarter. The sales team made a deal with the marketing team: if sales exceeded their conversion rate by 5%, marketing had to pay for the sales team’s trip to Cancun. There are countless ways to spin this, and you will be surprised and amused to see your bosses confronted with on-the-spot decision making.
Now that everybody is awake - and Carl is more engaged than ever - schedule some virtual team bonding exercises. Whatever the difficulty or format, from a hair-pulling, solution-finding exercise inspired by ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ (which we highly recommend) to a simple collaborative and creative workshop, the recipe is the same: create breakout rooms, randomize the participants, throw in a moderator, and let your teams find solutions or debate key themes that may or may not relate to your business.
Invite the teams on stage to present their results, with supporting files uploaded to the session if needed. To make things more interesting, allocate points based on your audience’s vote - this links in nicely with the leaderboard covered in the final idea.
After an action-packed morning, give your attendees a breather - think of it as the virtual coffee break of the day. During this time, enable the chat and networking features so the speakers and managers can hold an online meeting on the side while the rest of the participants mingle.
Entice your team to share pictures from earlier in the year: corporate parties, team dinners, even pictures of your dog (more people are interested than you think). While they laugh over shared memories, plug in a live DJ or band and experience how music can transform what was previously a purely visual event.
Nothing gets people going like a leaderboard. Throughout each session you can allocate points to different teams or attendees; before the event, simply define the rules and structure of your gamified feature to track your audience’s engagement through questions, polls, and uploaded content.
New starters in the team? Encourage conversation and connection by awarding points to colleagues who arrange meetings with new team members. When attendees are confronted with a leaderboard, they will most likely play along and compete - especially if you are giving out prizes to the winners. Go Carl!
Whether your kick-off lasts a couple of hours or two days, and whether you are 10 people or 2,000, make sure it is not a hassle for participants to take part. Rather than juggling Zoom for the videoconference, Slido for the Q&As, and Kahoot for the gamified polls, consider an all-in-one event management platform that keeps everything behind a single login. Check that your event WiFi is up to scratch too - you don’t want a glitchy experience. Transforming your kick-off into a virtual format should remove friction for your team, not add it.
A virtual kick-off is an online gathering, usually held at the start of a year or quarter, where a company shares its goals and strategy and brings teams together through live sessions, activities, and networking on a virtual event platform.
Vary the voices and formats: use multiple speakers, live Q&A with upvoting, polls and emoji reactions, breakout-room challenges, casual networking breaks, and gamification with a leaderboard and prizes, so attendees take part rather than just watch.
You can, but asking participants to log in and out of separate tools for videoconferencing, Q&A, and gamified polls quickly becomes a hassle. An all-in-one event management platform such as Canapii combines live streaming, engagement, networking, and gamification behind a single login.
The format scales from a team of 10 to a whole company of 2,000 and beyond - Canapii supports events with 10,000+ attendees - so the same five ideas work whether your kick-off lasts two hours or two days.
Canapii has powered 2,000+ events for 300,000+ attendees across 45+ countries. If you are planning a kick-off your team will actually talk about, get a demo and see how one platform handles streaming, engagement, and gamification end to end.