Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Logan Clements, Freelance Event Producer, and today I'm so excited to be with you again for another installment of my favorite event tips and tricks when it comes to planning events and running your own business. Today we're going to tackle some of my favorite hacks for how to make your event look good using Zoom. So one of the things I feel like most of us have been living in Zoom when it comes to meetings, I know I've been using it for calls with my family, for friends hangouts, for everything. And I've seen a lot of people using it to do their virtual events or their virtual meetings, whatever it is. And there are some very simple tips and tricks that I've learned from producing several events via Zoom that you can apply to your next virtual event to just increase your production quality. Make it feel a little bit more polished, a little bit more snazzy. So stick around. As always, before we get into it, please remember to subscribe. Click that little ding ding bell. Click the bell below to subscribe and get notified every single Monday when I drop new videos. Like, dislike, comment below. Feel free to follow me on Instagram, social media. I'll link to my website too if you're interested in learning more about what I do. But that's my self promo for Logan and Logan's Strategy Group. Let's get back into it. So my first basic Zoom hack to elevate your next virtual event is spotlighting. Now, spotlighting is where you can showcase one person to the speaker view for all of your attendees. And so you might be familiar with, you know, there's speaker view and there's gallery view. And so if everyone's in speaker view, normally what Zoom does is it'll just hop from person to person based on who's talking or if a microphone is open. I don't know if you've been there when someone's like rustled and it's flipped from the speaker to some random person rustling in the background and then back to the speaker. But spotlighting essentially allows you to control that speaker mode. So instead of it just following the noise, you can spotlight a person. And so the way you can do that, I'll show you right now, is if you actually go up to the dropdown with multiple people. Well, sorry, caveat, you need to have at least two people, if not three people in your meeting. And then you can spotlight. So it's in those three little dots. Hit that little dropdown and you'll see spotlighting. That's what you want to click. That'll start the spotlight for people. And then when you want to cancel the spotlight, you can either you'll see a little button that comes up in the left that says cancel spotlight video or you can just start spotlighting the next person. So say, for example, you were playing music and you wanted to showcase everyone doing fun little funky dance moves. Well, you can spotlight so they don't have to be saying anything and you can just feature their video. I've seen this done adorably on a TEDx event that I was at, and they had people to get their friends, their family, their dogs, whoever they were quarantining with, and hold them up. And it was super cute then to get to like hop around to each person's house that somebody was spotlighting. Now, the difference between spotlighting and pinning, let's talk about that real quick. Pinning is just for your device. So this will just affect your view. It's a great way if you have a moderator of a panel or a speaker, you come back to you frequently and you don't want to lose them. You can pin them, but that only affects you. Spotlighting affects everybody. Now, Zoom does not have a function where I can like override in Zoom meeting and make everyone be in speaker view because people can always click gallery. But it just lets them know that if they're in speaker view, you are controlling who gets spotlight. And I probably should have started this whole out saying these are controls that you get as the host for the meeting. You can also, I believe, do it as well as if you're a co-host. But if you're the host for the meeting, you can spotlight people as you go through. I've used this both for a virtual graduation party I've done, a virtual press conference. All of these things you can just spotlight people as you go. And it just elevates your event a little bit because you're a little more intentional about who you are showcasing. And you're not having those weird moments where it cuts to someone coughing or a baby crying in the background or a dog barking or whatever it is to someone else who's not muted themselves during your event. My next basic hack for elevating your next virtual event on Zoom is chat scripts. So we all have seen the chat function. You have the option as the admin to turn this on or off. I've seen it done well and not well, I guess, with the chat function. But the big thing is you want to think about a script. What are some written responses or written things that you can be putting in the chat during your event? So whether it's welcoming people before you get started and letting them know you'll start in a little bit. Maybe it's writing out the main points from your speaker and putting them in this chat to kind of spark conversation. Maybe it's asking a question. Where's everyone watching from to get people talking and chatting? You can pre-plan these things and you can put them in your rundown, your run of show, and just have them already made ahead of your event. And I would recommend having someone who's just moderating the chat. You can definitely do it as a one-woman show. But it is easier if the speaker's just kind of looking at the chat, but you have someone specific who's just there to help answer questions. You have an ending message. Thanks so much for joining us. Here's where to follow us. Give them an action item post-event. So think about what scripts you can put in your chat, where you can pre-write those, and then just have to copy and paste them in during your event. This next one's one of my favorites for elevating a virtual event. This is having an opening slide and walk-in music. So just like when you get to the movies early. Gosh, to go to the movies. I can't wait until one day we're able to go back to the movie theater. But, you know, they don't just have you come in and look at a blank screen or a black screen. I mean, I've done it a couple times where I've walked in. It's like jarring. You're like, why is everything off? They have previews. They have things showing both to entertain you and to let you know you're in the right place. Things are going to be happening soon. Same with your virtual event. It's very easy for you just to share a slide from your computer and also play like a playlist of welcome in music. And that slide could be a static slide. If you want to start with baby steps, have one static slide that just says starting soon and maybe the title of your event so people know they're at the right Zoom link. And then you could also have it as a sponsor reel. You could have a slideshow of multiple things going on just saying, hey, we're starting in 15 minutes. I found having that plus having a little bit of music just kind of elevates the experience of your virtual event and gets people relaxed and easy going. Now, bonus tip would be when you're sharing music from your computer via Zoom, you really want to make sure that the audio on your side. When I say the audio, I mean the audio in whatever music player you're using. So like I use Spotify. It's really far down. You want to have it at like 10 percent, 20 percent. And the best way to do this is to test it in rehearsal with somebody else. You can say, how does it sound coming out of your computer? Because I found when I stream and share music from my computer through Zoom, it often sounds quiet on my end, but it's like bumping and almost way too loud on the other end. And so that's where that 10 to 20 percent, depending on the kind of music you're playing, is kind of the sweet spot to just have some nice, gentle or exciting background music while people are entering your event. And this is something you can do by opening your Zoom link 10 minutes early, five minutes early, 15 minutes early, whatever it is. That just helps provide a little bit more production level to your next virtual event on Zoom. For my next basic Zoom hack, this one affects you more on the production side, but this is something you could talk about to your participants as well. But this is that hide non-video participants option. So I worked with a lot of speakers over the last couple of weeks and helping them hide that in their settings. Meaning you cannot hide non-video participants for all the people participating, unfortunately. It just affects your personal computer and it's in your video settings. But it's really helpful for speakers if they don't want to see anyone who's choosing to have their video off. Or maybe your format is everyone has their video off while you do a panel discussion, then you have everyone turn their video on. It just makes it for a cleaner visual because right now Zoom only has the capabilities to let you show one person or you show everybody with their video on. And so here's a way that I've done it as a hack if I don't want to be seeing all the attendees, is myself or the other admin on the Zoom meeting will actually go through and turn people's videos off and turn off their mics. And then going back to my other point about the chat script, we put it in the chat for you to hide non-video participants. And what that means is it's just going to hide anyone who doesn't have their video on. And so we've done this as a DIY way to make panels look a little bit more exciting and you can manually turn people off. Bonus tip here too though is if you as the host manually turn off someone's video or you mute them, they are then going to have to, you're going to have to give them permission to unmute. So I've had this happen with users saying, oh I can't unmute myself, what happened? Oh, it's because myself as the host, I muted them and therefore for them to unmute themselves, I would have to give them permission to do that. It's usually a pop-up. Same thing if I wanted to unmute them, I've muted them as the host. If I wanted to unmute them, it's going to have a pop-up on their screen that tells them the host is trying to unmute you and they have to hit yes. It's a nice privacy factor of Zoom. I can't just like magically listen into their house without their permission. But for some non-so-tech-to-savvy speakers, that can also be an issue. So it's just something to think about. But you can do this both as a producer, you can go in and event host, you can just turn it off for yourself, you can use it as a guideline for your attendees in terms of if you want them to only see certain people on video, or you can just use it as a fun speaker tip for them just to clean up their visual on Zoom a little bit. And for my last and final basic Zoom hack to elevate your next virtual event is to make sure when you screen share a video, to just double, double, double, double check. I always like to say double, double check. It's redundant, I get it. But double, double check that you click the little box. After you hit screen share, it'll open up a pop-up asking what window you want to share specifically. But at the bottom, you will see a little box that says share computer audio. So if the video has audio, check that. As you can see here on the screen, it shows you optimize video for higher quality. And you want to make sure you have that checked as well. I've found at times in the moment, you're in the middle of an event, sometimes you forget to do that. But what it does is it essentially will ensure that you're at the highest quality sharing of your video. If you don't check that box, your video will come across to everybody else except you, because it's coming from your computer, a little choppy. And it will kind of be this weird start, stop, the jumping thing. And so you want to make sure you check that box, and it will make sure that it's as smooth as possible when you're trying to broadcast your video across the ether to everybody else at your virtual event. And that's it, guys. That's all I have for you on my basic hacks for hosting your next Zoom event. I think there's a lot more that we're constantly learning. I know Zoom is constantly also changing its functions and updates and trying to make it easier to use. But these are just some of my go-to tips and tricks when I've been producing events through Zoom. And I've noticed that other organizations are also starting to use them a little bit. Try implementing one or two at your next virtual event, and you might be surprised that people are really impressed by these small adjustments that you made on the production side that just made it that much smoother of an experience. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below. Hit that little bell to subscribe. Turn on the little notification. I drop new videos every single Monday. I love producing events via Zoom. I wish there's also something that's a little bit better than that. But as always, reach out if you have questions. I'm always happy to help answer them. I'm Logan Clements, freelance event producer, and this has been another installment in my favorite tips and tricks when it comes to event planning and running your own business. I guess that's all I have for you guys. Happy Zooming, and I'll talk to you guys next week. Bye.