You need graduate school credits, your supervisor asked you to, or you want to bring people together. Either way, you want to organise a workshop. Organising workshops can be exciting and rewarding. It's a great way to get to know more people and have other people know you. Chances are, if you clicked on this blog, you already think that it's worth the hassle.
But where do you start? A workshop usually hosts multiple talks. Some might be from speakers you don't yet know. You need to find a location, participants, coffee and tea. Unfortunately, workshops don't tend to come with a set of instructions. It isn't something you learn in university -- except if you've been in a student association. You can ask experienced people for tips, or get that experience yourself.
Last month, I did just that. I organised a workshop about a topic I'm passionate about: Machine Learning for Earth Observation. I think it's paramount that we collaborate and learn from each other. Organising this workshop was a really fun experience -- and I was a bit shocked at how many things I learned. In this blog, I share 7 tips to make your workshops more satisfying and memorable. Each takes just a few minutes to apply.
Here's tip nr 1. Before you do anything like book rooms or send invites, I want you to take the time to do one simple thing. Take five minutes to reflect and write down what you want to achieve. I do this for every single project I plan, and it makes a real difference in time savings and the quality of the outcome. I write about this strategy in more detail in this blog.
The five-minute rule will help you set the scope and get an overview of all the subtasks. In just a few minutes, you will feel way more on top of things. there will not be as many last-minute "Oh, I need to do this, too."
I would work on my workshop on and off during spare minutes between meetings or at the end of the day. I could refer back at any time to the convenient list of rough steps that applying the five-minute rule gave me. Instead of straining to remember, I would just do the next item on the list.
There's a good chance that "finding participants" is somewhere at the top of your to-do list. That's where tip nr 2 comes in: you can reach a lot of people with minimal effort by preparing two email texts. The first one is an invitation email that you can forward to people directly. The second one is to introduce yourself to more senior people and ask them to forward your email. Paste the invitation text at the bottom of the forwarding request email. Spell-check these texts and save them somewhere for easy copy-pasting
Now don't be shy about sending invitations or asking people to forward your email! As many as 42 people signed up for my workshop (I was very proud). I think it's because I sent emails to so many people, even professors I didn't know! Don't forget to ask secretaries to forward your email to graduate school or institute mailing lists.
Picture this. You have a team outing this Thursday. Yesterday, you got an update saying that the weather will be nice, so bring sunscreen. But the email doesn't have any details about the time and location! You search your mailbox and find 5 emails about this event, but the first 3 you open don't have the information you're looking for. Argh!
Does this situation sound familiar? People rushing to your event need easy access to event information. For instance, they arrive at the building and need to look up the exact room number. Or the evening before they plan their transport and need to know the exact start time of the event. was it 14:00 or 14:15? People can decide not to come if it's too much of a bother to find the info. Or they might barge in late, disturbing the first speaker.
This problem is really easy to avoid. That's tip nr 3. Paste the most important information --most likely the info in the initial invitation-- at the end of every follow-up email. Be generous with the information. Paste it in the sign-up form, in the LinkedIn post, and on the university website. Give the participants many ways to find the information. you look very professional with very, very little effort. Power to the ctrl+c, ctrl+v!
Great workshops bring people together to exchange ideas. Rushed people don't absorb information as well. A rushed agenda also doesn't foster an atmosphere of exchange. You need to schedule enough breaks so people can reload between talks. Also, make the breaks long enough for people to get to know each other to create a real impact with your workshop! New connections will be made, maybe new research ideas will spring up. people will remember that this happened at your workshop!
So here's tip nr 4: schedule breathing room. Plan for talks going a little over time, and have enough breaks sufficiently long to foster discussion. The more people attend your event, the more time you need to give people time to go to the bathroom, etc.
We've all been there. A full room awkwardly waiting while the next speaker fumbles with the HDMI cable. Best case, it's a microbreak for the audience. Worst case, you lose time and your audience's attention waiting for IT. Tip nr 5 to the rescue: keep all the slides on a single device. Ask your speakers to send their slides ahead of time and put them in a single place, like a USB stick or your laptop. I like to number the slides in order of appearance for minimal thinking during the event!
Workshops start with emails, and I think they should end with them, too! Tip nr 6: Send a thoughtful thank-you email a few days after your workshop. Remind your participants of the nice day, and share links to resources or contact details. Don't forget to ask for photos to put on social media. Thank-you emails remind people of questions they forgot to ask or handy resources a speaker mentioned. They also give people another opportunity to connect. A participant responded to my thank-you email by making a Slack server to stay in touch!
My final tip is about helping yourself remember 😅. I have forgotten about so many events I organised in University. I regret it, because these things can be relevant to put on your CV or just nice to reflect on! Tip nr 7: So post photos of the workshop on social media like LinkedIn so you have an online database of events and you can remember your successes.
In this blog, I shared 7 tips that only take a few minutes, but make your workshops much smoother and successful:
I'm super happy with how my workshop went and what I learned from it. But learning never stops. I discovered many new tips that I couldn't have thought of before actually being at my workshop. In another blog post, I will write about what I would do differently the next time I organise a workshop. Some things you can only learn by experiencing them. But don't be afraid to do it imperfectly, you'll learn more than by not doing it at all. So, go forth and organise your workshop. I hope these tips will make your workshop a success, as well.
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