Overview of how to facilitate a virtual meeting or workshop with Toasty

We built Toasty to create a high level of engagement in a virtual environment, something that doesn't exist in most video meeting platforms.

We believe that in order to foster an "engaging" experience, the host has to facilitate and get the participants to actively participate (that's how you keep them awake too by the way).

Toasty is a video conferencing platform with ready-made activities to engage and connect your remote team members. Here are some key points about Toasty:

• Toasty is for running virtual meetings or workshops, e.g. client onboarding, ideation/brainstorming workshop, team training, community meetings, giving the host/facilitator more control and flexibility than ever before.
• Although you have the ability to customize, you don't need to design everything from scratch. Toasty offers highly effective templates that you can just choose and use right away.
• With a high level of engagement, Toasty is designed to be used on a laptop or desktop computer, so the participants are fully focused.

As the host/facilitator, you're in control

Toasty is designed for the host to be fully in control of the flow of the session. That means:

• You design and pre-plan the agenda and interactions for your live session
• You control the timing of the interactions
• You send all participants to breakout rooms and bring them back to the main room whenever you want
• You choose when to show the Q&A questions to respond to them

Toasty is about having a structured way to run the meeting: move people, structure conversations, and capture ideas. With Toasty, you can facilitate a great session where everyone has a lot to takeaway!

Invite your participants by sharing the link

In the Toasty sidebar, you'll see the option to invite participants by sharing the invitation or the link. Just copy it and paste it into a calendar invite, email, Slack channel, etc. Let them know when they should join!

That's all the participant needs to join – they just open the link on their computer web browser, and we'll create a free account for them. There's nothing to download or install. 

Of course, there will be technical issues, so here are two articles to help you:

1. A quick participant guide: https://blog.toasty.ai/toasty-how-best-virtual-participants/
2. If they're having video & audio issues, here is a troubleshooting guide: https://helpdesk.toasty.ai/articles/60773-fixing-problems-with-video-and-audio

We recommend Google Chrome for the optimal experience, but Toasty also works in the Firefox browser. Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer are not supported for now, sorry.

Start your session

You can pre-plan your interactions. And when the time comes, you can join and watch as your participants come online. You'll be able to see each new person who arrives and say hi. Participants are muted on camera & microphone by default, so if you want them to speak in the main room, let them know to unmute themselves.

Share your screen

You'll probably have a slideshow, or a document to discuss during your session. You can share your screen at any time by clicking the Present icon.

Specific participants can also share their screens if you give them permission to, so you can have multiple presenters and switch between them seamlessly. Here is how:

1. Click on "Edit participants"

2. Toggle on "Screen share" for a specific participant

Full-screen mode

Toasty also has a full-screen view of the screen-share and video conferencing, so if you have some important numbers to show, your participants can see all the detail!

Let them know to open the ••• menu and click "View full screen"

Run Q&A

Toasty includes a full Q&A functionality, allowing your participants to submit questions anonymously throughout the session. They can even upvote other questions so the best ones rise to the top. 

As the host, you can click the toggle to show the Q&A questions to everyone, or hide them again. This means you can collect questions throughout and answer them all at the end! Very smooth.

Organize your participants into groups for small-group breakout activities

Toasty is about conversations and collaborations, so forming small groups and breaking out for group discussions and activities are key.

Grouping is optional – if you only have a handful of participants, doing activities in the main room with everyone will work fine. But for any more than 5 or so participants we highly recommend forming small groups.

Toasty offers a way to assign everyone into breakout groups via Random Groups activity.

Random Groups will assign everyone instantly based on the group size needed (for example 3 members to each group).

Send participants to their breakout rooms, and bring them back to the main room

Now that everyone is assigned to a group, as the host you can click the "Breakout into rooms" button to send everyone to their private group rooms.

Inside the group breakout rooms, you can get your participants talking about a certain topic with one of Toasty's group activities, like Conversation Cards or Group Response. 

You can bring the participants back into the main room at any time by clicking again on the Breakout toggle. You can do this many times in one session, it's really smooth.

Visit your participants in their breakout rooms

When Breakout mode is active and your participants are in the breakout rooms, you are free to jump into any room to say hi and check up on that group. It's so easy to move between rooms.

Click on this icon 

And you'll be prompted