Even after your workshop is over, you should still consider how you are interacting with participants and making your workshop's content available afterwards. This page covers several different strategies for engaging participants post-workshop, including how to prepare a recording of a workshop and share it with participants, how to share workshop materials with participants and others, and what other follow-up considerations you should consider.
Editing the Recording
One of the many ways you can continue to reach community members after your workshop is over is by recording the event and then sharing the recording link. Recording the workshop can be a very useful outreach strategy, but also requires more intensive editing and preparation than other forms of post-workshop engagement. Editing a video or recording includes:
Removing virtual participants' camera views from the recording. If you record over a platform like Zoom, the recording may capture private information about participants, including their names, email addresses, facial features, and more. Keeping this information in a recording can compromise participants' privacy and could lead to legal issues. As such, you should remove virtual participants' camera views from the recording to protect their privacy. If you use a platform like Zoom to record, you should also consider changing the Zoom settings beforehand to make sure it does not record virtual participants' screens in the first place.
- Editing the video length to remove awkward pauses at the beginning and end of the workshop. Oftentimes, hybrid event recordings have awkward gaps at the beginning and end of the recording as presenters begin or stop the recording, or as they handle any technical issues. You should edit these sections out of the video so people watching the recording do not have to sit through these moments and can instead start watching right at the beginning of the event. Mediaspace does not have a robust editing software, but it does allow you to trim sections from the beginning and end of a video.
- Edit or add captions to the recording. This can be an intensive process, but it is an extremely important way to make your event more accessible to a wider asynchronous audience. You should edit the captions even if you used auto-captioning software during the event. While auto-captioning is useful, it is usually inaccurate and can be frustrating to use, especially for audiences viewing the recording. Several resources about the captioning process are included below. If you are using Kaltura to edit caption, save your work every 20 minutes. If you wait to save, your editing session will time out and your work will be lost.
- Add chapters to longer videos. Dividing longer recordings into sections can help people find the part of the video that is most relevant to their interests. You can do this in Mediaspace by using the timeline feature. It can be helpful to identify the start time of each chapter in the description.
- Link additional materials. People watching the recording will want to access the materials you used and shared during your event. Have those materials prepared ahead of time and share them with your recording. This may take the form of adding information about them to the end of the recording, sharing links to the materials in the description of your video, and more. Materials you should share include:
- A transcript of the recording. This should be created after you have edited the captions for the recording.
- Powerpoint slides and other handouts from the event.
- URLs to resources discussed during the event.
Follow-Up with Participants
After the workshop is over, you should follow-up with participants in several different ways. Follow-up tasks include:
- Thank participants for attending.
- Share event materials with participants. These include Powerpoint slides, handouts, key URLs from the event, and a link to event recording once it is ready.
- Include information about who participants can contact with further questions about the workshop. Participants may not be certain about who to contact, or they may have learned who to contact during the workshop but have lost or forgotten that information since.