Virtual Communication in a COVID-19 world

Not only are we seeing grown-ass men and women fight for bog roll at Aldi, but as Graphic Recorders we are finding some of our bigger events are being cancelled due to COVID-19 fears, and this is no doubt starting to extend to smaller meetings and workshops too.

If you are considering cancelling an upcoming workshop, meeting or presentation, here are some alternatives that might help keep the ball rolling as we navigate these strange times.

1) Virtual Meetings & Virtual Graphic Recording using Zoom

I love Zoom. There. I said it. Zoom is now my preferred communication method for all my pre-event briefings with clients, and has given me back hours of travel time in place of in-person meetings. I. LOVE. IT.

It’s free for 1:1 meetings and up to 40mins for group meetings, and the paid version is still very reasonable at $20.99 – $27.99 depending on your requirements.

The other exciting thing about Zoom and our industry is the ability to graphically record events remotely. Recently I had an event with Monash University in Melbourne pop up when I was due to be in Singapore. Using a combination of FaceTime and Zoom’s screen-share function, I was able to scribe this event and provide real-time graphics for my clients, just as if I were there in person.

2) Facebook Live presentations & Virtual Graphic Recordings

Facebook Live is another great tool to virtualise more presentation-based communications. The function can be used publicly from a personal or business page, but also in private groups for a closed audience.

While audience members aren’t able to communicate by audio or video, they can still interact with the speaker and each other via the comments.

This is a great option if you want to be able to access the video later, as it will save to the page that you went live from AND you can download it as a video file when you’re finished.

Graphic Recording is an awesome addition to this style of session too, and can be set up as a separate live stream for people to watch concurrently, and/or utilise the output as an additional summary comms piece for both those in attendance and those who couldn’t make it.

3) Visualise your content for engaging communications

The other thing to consider in times where it may be harder to get groups together is how to improve your communications as whole.

Using visuals like rich pictures, infographics and explainer illustrations or videos are an excellent way to make your content more engaging and accessible for a broad audience, including cross-function and cross-region. We can get the gist of a visual scene in 1/10 of a second. People following directions with text + illustrations do 323% times better than text alone. You get 6 x better memory recall for information that is both verbal and visual, as opposed to verbal alone. I could go on. Visuals = efficient, engaging communication.

These are strange times. But amongst the scariness, frustration and inconveniences, there are also opportunities to try new approaches to how we communicate. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Let’s find some silver linings in this mother! If you’ve been considering trying more virtual tools, there’s no time like the present.

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Interested in learning more about virtual Graphic Recording or other visual services? Get in touch.