Five tips to make an online conference engaging – Wikimedia Ukraine’s experience

Online conferences are more inclusive and less expensive than in-person events – but Zoom fatigue is a real thing.

Over the past years, we at Wikimedia Ukraine have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make our online events more engaging for participants. We haven’t fully cracked it yet, but we do have a few tips to share.

This post is mostly based on the two major online conferences we held in 2024 – an event for educators in August and a general Wikiconference for the whole community in October. Both were two-day events that attracted around 60-70 people each.

1. Make the program shorter and more dynamic than for in-person events

Offline conferences tend to have full-day programs. For online events this might be too much. It’s much more difficult to sustain attention in online meetings for an extended period of time.

So, for our online conferences the programs are shorter, typically no more than four or five hours per day. We also try to have more lightning talks and short sessions, 10 to 25 minutes each. 45-minute sessions are rare, and even longer ones aren’t scheduled at all.

2. Have an interactive welcome session with a lot of fun activities 

For this year’s conferences we made sure to have a welcome session at the beginning that would help online participants connect with each other.

These sessions featured a lot fun interactive activities, such as:

• having participants mark their city on an interactive map so we can see the geography of participants in real time;
• short surveys with Zoom tools or Slido;
• a contest for the best photo of participants’ workplace during the conference.

3. Integrate interactive elements in all other sessions

We have tried to add interactivity to other sessions as well. Partly this means organizing more discussions, where we can split participants into smaller breakout rooms.

Conferences still feature a lot of presentations and lecture-type sessions, though. For those, we asked speakers to use polls and pose questions to the audience to keep their attention.

4. Make it easier to consume conference content on-demand later

For online conferences, not all conference content is meant to be consumed in real time. Participants should have an opportunity to watch or listen to the sessions later (including at a higher speed to save time).

All Wikimedia Ukraine’s online conferences are either streamed to YouTube in real time or uploaded to YouTube / Wikimedia Commons afterwards. We also create timecodes to access each session easily and link to them from the program page.

An even more accessible way to catch up with a session if it’s a presentation rather than a discussion is to review the presenter’s slides. So we also ask speakers to upload their slides to Wikimedia Commons and link to the file from the program page.

5. Ask for participants’ feedback – and use it

Asking participants for feedback afterwards is important for every event, but especially so for online conferences.

For both major online conferences we held in 2024, almost all participants filled out the feedback form. We try to offer incentives to provide feedback. For example, we offered official certificates of participation for the education conference, but filling out the feedback form was mandatory for receiving a certificate.

Of course, equally important is analyzing feedback and using it to improve the next events.

Read more:

• Wikimedia Ukraine’s conference for educators (in Ukrainian)
• Diff post about Wikimedia Ukraine’s annual Wikiconference