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Miro for workshops & meetings

Marina Perminova
  • Updated

Miro is a natural fit for workshops and meetings and you can definitely use our product for such needs. 

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Miro features for remote workshops & meetings 

 Here are some of the top features for remote workshops and meetings:

  • Infinite canvas [available on all plans]

Work the way you want with your team on an infinite whiteboard that allows you to run workshops and meetings without any boundaries. 

  • Freeform collaboration [available on all plans]

Miro is an online whiteboard platform, that’s why easy freehand drawing with the pen tool is available to all users. Also, try Smart drawing that will automatically convert your drawings into shapes, sticky notes, and connection lines.

  • Sticky notes and offline stickies capture [available on all plans]

Many offline meetings and workshops run on sticky notes. We brought them online, made them super-powerful yet easy to use. And for those of you who still prefer writing your ideas on physical stickies, we added Stickies capture – the feature that allows you to instantly convert photos into editable sticky notes.  

  • Attention management [basic features available on all plans, advanced – on paid and Education plans]

Attention management is a set of powerful facilitation features for meetings and workshops - Follow, Bring to me [one collaborator], Bring everyone to me. These features allow meeting organizers and workshop facilitators to guide participants and ensure everyone is following and engaged. 

  • Video chat [available on Starter, Business, and Enterprise plans]

Conduct seamless collaborative remote sessions with built-in video chat without having to maintain two links or switch between apps.

  • Presentation mode [available on all plans]

Kick-off workshop or meeting or present results back to stakeholders without leaving Miro. Presentation mode allows you to prepare and carry out engaging presentations re-using the content that you already have on your Miro board.

  • Visual notes [available on all plans]

Visual notes is a lightweight feature-rich text editor easily accessible on the board just when you need it – to jot down questions, insights, and action items as they surface during your workshops and meetings.

  • Pre-made workshop templates [available on all plans]

Never start from scratch – use built-in Design Thinking, ice breaker, and Agile rituals templates to prepare workshops and organize meetings quickly. 

  • Voting [available on Starter, Education, Business, and Enterprise plans]

Quickly vote for tasks and ideas in real-time with your distributed team to reach a consensus when working on a decision or prioritizing tasks.

  • Timer [available on Starter, Education, Business, and Enterprise plans]

Meetings, trainings, presentations, and brainstorms tend to run over when there is no way to time box these activities. With timer, your team can manage and track your time while presenting, brainstorming or participating in a workshop.

  • Lock 

Use lock to prevent objects from being accidentally moved, edited or deleted from the board by meeting or workshop participants. Board owners on paid plans can use protected lock. 

  • Visitors with edit access [available on Starter, Education, Business, and Enterprise plans]

Share your boards with visitors to organize remote meetings (such as PI Planning or sales demos), brainstorming sessions, and workshops with partners or colleagues who either don't have a Miro profile yet or don’t have access to your Miro team.

  • Chat

Send messages to your collaborators right on the board during a session using the in-built chat.

 

How to set up a workshop in Miro

  1. Define the goal of the workshop and the audience.
  2. Choose the time and date.
  3. Prepare the board.
  • Think about and make
    • the templates that you’re going to use: you can use pre-built or create something from scratch
    • the exercises you’re going to apply: creating ideas, voting for the best choice, clustering inputs, inserting some visuals for mood board, etc.
  • Create simple instructions for every step (template or exercise) of your workshop
  • Define time-limits for every step and overall timing
  • Check our Miro demo board for workshops. You can customize it to your needs
    ? Try Miro Smart meetings (currently in beta)
  • Book the timeslot for the workshop in the calendar and invite participants.
    ? Use Miro app for Google Calendar to easily embed your board into the Google Calendar and invite participants from there
  • Share the board with participants.
  • Send invitations to the participants. Don’t forget to add:
  • Time and date
  • Agenda
  • Technical requirements
  • Start workshop.
  • Align with the participants about goal and agenda
  • Warm up and onboard participants with ice breakers
  • Collaborate during the workshop or meeting.
    • Don’t forget about quick breaks to keep participants engaged
  • Synthesize the conclusion.
  • Make a retro and get feedback.
  • Follow up with participants on the results of the session. 
    • Share or export the whole board or specific frames
  • Reuse the materials of the workshop in the future.

 

Workshop best practices  

  • Onboarding & ice breakers 
    • Let people introduce themselves
    • Use ice breakers with funny and engaging tasks
    • Let people try Miro functionality during ice breakers (with stickies, shapes, different colors)
    • For Miro newbies, it is better to have a separate frame with all the instruments that they are going to use during the session and where to find them. You can use How to templates to onboard new participants. Also, it would be helpful to ask them to watch these Miro onboarding videos
    • Invite participants to use reactions
  • Timing & the recommended number of collaborators 
    • Keep workshop or meeting under 2 hours, for longer session make more breaks
    • Good size of the group for remote sessions is under 15 participants. For more participants get co-facilitator
    • Time-box everything: activities, discussions, and feedback. You can use the timer function for that
  • General facilitation tips 
    • Use sticky notes for rapid ideation (try bulk mode!), and use Cmd + D (for Mac) or Ctrl + D (for Windows) to duplicate the stickies
    • Include short explanations of the exercises on the board
    • Work in groups and individually. Create separate frames for such type of work on the board
    • Plan a couple more breaks than you would in a normal workshop and recommend that people step away from their computer
    • Assume that technology will fail you and always have a backup plan prepared for that case

 

Inviting collaborators

There are several options for inviting collaborators and conducting a remote workshop or meeting in Miro.

 

Option 1: Visitors on Starter, Education, Business, and Enterprise plans

Users on Starter, Business, Enterprise, and Education plans are able to share their boards via a public link for editing with non-registered visitors. This is the simplest way to invite users without the Miro profile to contribute to your work on boards free of charge.

Once you make a board accessible for visitors who can edit, anyone with the board link can immediately start editing the board content. You can share the link with as many visitors as you need.

 

Option 2: Guests on Business Plan

Invite guests with edit access on Business Plan. This is a secure way to share particular boards via email with editors without needing to add them to your team as full members. Learn more.

 

Option 3: Free plan 

If you are looking for real-time collaboration on an online whiteboard with freehand drawing and sticky notes, Free plan is a great starting point for you as you can invite an unlimited number of collaborators with editor rights to your team and each of our boards is infinite. 

Please, note:

  • You can have three active editable boards at a time, other boards will be archived
  • All boards are visible to all team members – everyone, who you invite to your Miro team can see your content 
  • Features like video chat, timer, and voting are not available on the Free plan

 

Videoconferencing

It’s also possible to use Miro together with your videoconferencing tool of choice: 

  • Invite meeting or workshop participants to the board and to the video call 
  • Have the meeting organizer or workshop facilitator share their screen with the Miro board open 
  • Present content and invite everyone to collaborate on the board

 

Templates

Never start from scratch with Miro pre-made templates. Use Brainwriting, Retrospective, Ice Breaker templates and more with your team as is or use them for inspiration to build your own. 

You can

  • create and save your own custom templates and share them with your team on Starter, Education, Business plans
  • share templates across multiple teams on the Enterprise Plan

 

Integrations

Miro is designed to complement and enhance your workflow, not break it. That is why you can streamline your workflow with Miro by using integrations with tools you already love and use such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google, Confluence, and more.

For example, you can 

  • Use Slack or Microsoft Teams integrations to be aware of new comments and mentions on your boards and other changes related to your profile and respond to them instantly
  • Add Google Drive documents to Miro, open and edit them without leaving the board

Visit Miro Marketplace to learn more about integrations. Cannot find an integration with the tool your team uses? Build one using the Miro Developer Platform. 

 

Once your meeting is over, you can limit access of the participants to the board by removing them from the Sharing settings or stopping sharing the board via other means. Alternatively, you can allow your collaborators to enter the board later at any time and even copy the board to their Miro teams. 

 

Useful links

Blog posts

Videos

Frameworks

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