Whether you’re a project manager or team leader, the right meeting management software can make managing efficient meetings easy and save you valuable time.

In this guide, we’ll explore the best meeting management software, each offering unique features to help you plan, execute, and optimize your meetings effectively.

Good meetings are how the best teams align, make decisions and discuss what’s important to them. The majority of employees spent up to one third of their work week in meetings. Doesn’t that time deserve to be spent well?

An effective stand-up meeting can set your team up for success. On the other hand, bad meetings can feel like a waste of time. So how do you go about ensuring you have productive meetings that also stay on time?

The best meeting management software will not only help you create agendas and stay on time, but they’ll help you streamline your entire process. These tools make it easy to organize your meetings, share the agenda with participants and run the session effectively.

But how do you choose the right tool? In this guide, we’ll share some of the most effective meeting management tools on the market, outlining key features and benefits. Let’s explore!

What is meeting management?

Meeting management is the systematic process of planning, organizing, facilitating, and following up on meetings to ensure they are productive, efficient, and valuable.

In a professional or organizational context, meetings play a crucial role in decision-making, collaboration, communication, and problem-solving. However, without proper management, meetings can easily become time-consuming, unproductive, and frustrating for participants.

Whether it’s a daily stand-up, company all-hands or decision making meeting, every session benefits from being well structured and managed.

One important point when it comes to choosing meeting management software is considering your existing toolset and ways of working. For some remote teams, you may want a complete meeting platform with all the bells and whistles. For others, using an agenda planning tool will be enough to supercharge your meetings alongside your existing video conferencing tool.

In any case, remember that your meeting management solution works alongside the person leading and facilitating the meeting. Think of the solution you use as a way to streamline your process, make tedious tasks easier and save you time. Choose your tool accordingly!

SessionLab: Streamlined Meeting Agenda Planning and Facilitation

Best meeting agenda software

SessionLab is an agenda planning tool that makes it easy to quickly create and share your meeting agendas. Drag, drop and reorder your blocks to create your meeting agenda in minutes. Support your meeting process by adding notes, links and attachments to agenda items. It’s a powerful, easy-to-use tool for anyone looking to create well-structured and engaging meetings.

Automatic timing calculation: SessionLab handles timing calculations for you, so you can focus on creating a tight meeting schedule. Create meeting agendas with minute-perfect timing with ease. As you make changes, SessionLab will automatically update your timing, no need to manually calculate your time schedule.

Collaborative Meeting Planning: Collaborate with your team to design effective meeting agendas and plans, ensuring that everyone is aligned and able to contribute. Invite team members to leave their comments and work together in real time on collaborative agendas.

Access to a Library of Meeting Templates: Save time by utilizing a library of pre-made meeting templates for various types of meetings, from brainstorming sessions to project retrospectives. Running recurring meetings? Create your own agenda templates so you and your team can quickly and consistently run more productive sessions.

Beautiful printouts: Create materials that help you prepare and conduct meetings. Export your meeting agenda in a format that works for you. Customize your printouts to include the information you and your team members need.

Time-tracking during your meeting: Use Time Tracker to keep your agenda on track during your meeting. See where you are against your plan and effectively timebox each item in your agenda. Add meeting minutes and notes to your agenda so everything you need is in one place.

Key Features of SessionLab:

• Fast, effective agenda design.
• Automatic timing calculation.
• Collaborative meeting planning.
• Access to a library of meeting templates.
• Beautiful printouts.

How much does SessionLab cost?

SessionLab is absolutely free to get started with, including ten sessions and everything you need to starting creating better agendas and having more productive meetings. Want more robust features that can enhance team productivity? SessionLab Pro starts at $15 per month, with unlimited sessions, real-time collaboration, exports to Word and much more.

Microsoft Teams: Microsoft-powered collaboration

Best corporate meeting management solution

Microsoft Teams is an all-in-one collaboration platform that combines real-time messaging, video conferencing, and robust meeting management capabilities. It’s an ideal choice for organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem and who want to link meetings to projects and documents easily.

Teams is an effective, collaborative platform where remote teams are able to chat, file share and host video meetings, all in one-place. While it may lack some advanced agenda management capabilities, Teams is a great all-rounder that is a natural choice for PowerPoint and Office 365 users.

Key Features of Microsoft Teams:

• Real-time collaboration and messaging.
• Video and audio conferencing.
• File sharing and integration with Microsoft 365 apps.
• Task and project management.

How much does Microsoft Teams cost?

Microsoft Team has a free version to get started with. Paid plans for Microsoft Teams begin at $4 per user, per month.

Hypercontext: One on one meetings All-star

Best one on one meeting software

Hypercontext is a meeting management tool with a strong focus on helping managers have productive 1:1 meetings and performance reviews with their team members.

Hypercontext integrates with popular calendar apps like Google Calendar and Outlook to help ensure that meeting schedules are synchronized and up-to-date. It also includes tools to aid collaboration and engagement such as discussion boards and action item tracking. Syncing with project management software is a great benefit here.

We also loved the meeting analytics on offer. Hypercontext provides data on meeting frequency, duration, and engagement, enabling teams to make data-driven improvements to their process.

Key Features of Hypercontext:

• Meeting agenda creation and distribution.
• Integrations with calendar apps.
• Team collaboration tools.

How much does Hypercontext cost?

Hypercontext has a free plan if you want to take it for a spin, though if you want to start using more advanced features, Hypercontext starts at $7 per user, per month.

Zoom: Interactive Virtual Meetings and Webinars

Best video meeting software

Zoom is renowned for its video conferencing capabilities, making it an excellent choice for hosting interactive virtual meetings and webinars. Zoom is great at helping your run productive meetings online. Share screens, collaborate on documents, and annotate shared content in real-time. Use breakout rooms for group discussions or activities. You can also record meetings for later reference and take advantage of automatic transcription to easily generate meeting minutes.

In our experience, Zoom works best when paired with other meeting management tools that can handle your meeting agenda or help with engagement. We’ll often have a SessionLab meeting agenda in the second screen and integrate with a Miro board for collaborative work

Whatever other tools in your stack, you’ll absolutely need some meeting software that will actually host your team meetings and allow you to communicate over video. Zoom is a great choice for this!

Key Features of Zoom:

• Video and audio conferencing.
• Screen sharing and collaboration tools.
• Recording and transcription features.
• Virtual background and breakout rooms.

How much does Zoom cost?

Zoom starts out with a free plan. When you start running larger meetings or need some advanced hosting tools, plans start at $15.99 per month.

Meeting Booster: Effective Meeting Minutes Program

Best meeting minutes software

Meeting Booster is meeting software designed to help teams have more productive meetings and . While Meeting Booster offers a full meeting management solution, we found it a great choice of meeting minutes tool.

With its minute taking features, you can easily record actions in a meeting and then send the minutes and actions to meeting attendees without any fuss. Document sharing and meeting notes are streamlined with a common view of the discussion and action items that can be shared during the session.

We especially loved the features for formatting minutes. It makes it easy to create professional materials and get approval on your meeting minutes from necessary stakeholders.

Key Features of Meeting Booster:

• Take, format and distribute meeting minutes
• Meeting action items and task management
• Meeting analytics and reporting

How much does Meeting Booster cost?

Meeting Booster has a free trial with paid plans starting at $17.

Miro: Visual Collaboration and Brainstorming

Best visual meeting tool

Miro is a versatile visual collaboration platform that helps teams brainstorm, plan, and manage meetings with a focus on visual aids. It’s widely used among facilitators who answered the State of Facilitation survey, and with good reason!

In many of our remote meetings, we’ll work together in a Miro board, often collecting ideas, voting on solutions and collaborating visually.

A good meeting management tool helps during both the planning and running of your session. In Miro, you can use mind maps, flowcharts, and brainstorming templates to encourage creativity and problem-solving during your meeting. Getting people into a shared whiteboard can make it easy to illustrate ideas and recreate that in-person vibe among team members.

Top tip: when inviting participants to join a shared whiteboard, you’ll need to send them the right link, in most cases through a chat function. Make the experience seamless: when designing your meeting, add Miro links to the relevant parts of your agenda to make sure you keep everything you need at hand!

Key Features of Miro:

• Digital whiteboards and visual collaboration.
• Mind mapping and brainstorming tools.
• Integration with popular project management and productivity apps.

How much does Miro cost?

Miro has a limited free plan with up to 3 editable boards. Their paid plans start at $10 per user/per month.

Otter.ai: Transcription and Note-Taking

Best meeting notes software

Otter.ai is an AI-powered transcription and note-taking tool that is ideal for capturing meeting minutes, making them easily accessible and shareable for your team.

With Otter, you can automatically transcribe your online meeting in real-time or upload a record to create a transcription afterwards. It’ll automatically identify speakers and create accurate meeting minutes with ease.

Creating resources to support your meetings and make it easy for participants who couldn’t attend to catch-up is a great way to support your team. Meeting management tools like Otter can prove to be a wonderful addition to your toolset.

Key Features of Otter.ai:

• Real-time transcription and note-taking.
• AI-powered voice recognition.
• Searchable and shareable transcripts.
• Integration with calendar and communication apps.

How much does Otter.ai cost?

Otter starts with a free plan. The paid plan’s start at $10 per user, per month and include features like advanced collaboration and exports.

Calendly: Simplified Meeting Scheduling

Best meeting software for scheduling meetings

Calendly is an efficient scheduling and appointment booking tool that simplifies the process of arranging meetings, consultations, and appointments. It’s especially effective for arranging 1-1s or external meetings with clients.

Share your Calendly link, and participants can book appointments based on your availability. Easily set your working hours and specify when you’re available for meetings to get organized with ease. Calendly integrates with popular calendar apps like Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCloud too!

Calendly sends automated reminders and notifications to both you and participants, reducing the likelihood of no-shows. For us, this has been especially useful during hiring processes or when conducting user interviews. Scheduling meetings without extra busy work is exactly what meeting management solutions are good for. Use Calendly alongside an agenda planning tool like SessionLab to effectively plan and arrange your meetings.

Key Features of Calendly:

• Automated scheduling and appointment booking.
• Personalized meeting availability.
• Integration with calendar apps.
• Customizable meeting types and durations.
• Meeting reminders and notifications.

How much does Calendly cost?

Calendly also has a free plan. Unlock more advanced features such as unlimited event types and integrations starting at $10 per seat, per month.

Fellow: Collaborative Team Meetings

Best meeting management software for teams

Fellow is a specialized meeting management tool with a strong focus on team management, feedback and ongoing collaboration. Easily assign clear action items and takeaways to your meetings and track interactions and feedback over time.

Fellow has an agenda builder that is great for simple meetings that may not require more robust time-tracking. You can easily schedule follow up meetings after running a session too. It also integrates with task management tools like Asana, Trello, and Slack to help streamline your workflow.

Key Features of Fellow:

• Meeting agenda creation.
• Meeting prompts.
• Action item tracking and follow-up.
• Integrations with productivity tools.

How much does Fellow cost?

Fellow’s paid plans start at $9 per user, per month, with a minimum of 5 users. You can also try it for free.

Slido: Engage Your Audience with Live Polls and Q&A

Best engagement software for meetings

Slido is an audience engagement platform that enhances meetings and events with live polls, Q&A sessions, and real-time interaction. It’s a great tool to add to your all-hands meetings or workshops.

Slido makes it easy to engage participants with live polls and Q&A sessions, making meetings more interactive. It’s great for gathering feedback, asking questions, and getting opinions in real-time from your audience.

Integrate Slido with popular presentation software like PowerPoint or video conferencing tools to seamlessly incorporate audience engagement into your meetings. You can also access valuable data and insights about participant engagement and meeting performance.

Key Features of Slido:

• Live polls and Q&A sessions.
• Real-time audience engagement.
• Integration with presentation software.
• Analytics and reporting.

How much does Slido cost?

Slido has a free plan with simple engagement tools. For bigger events and more advanced features, plans start at $12 per month.

Stormz: Effective Facilitation Platform

Best meeting productivity tool

Stormz is a platform designed to facilitate engaging workshops and meetings, making it easier to brainstorm, collaborate, and reach decisions as a team. If you’re looking for meeting management software that helps you visually collaborate and run exercises in one spot, Stormz is a good shout!

In essence, Stormz works a lot like a simple, stripped-back online whiteboard designed for simplicity and ease use. Facilitate real-time brainstorming sessions and decision-making processes with intuitive, tools. Engage participants with interactive activities and exercises that encourage collaboration and creativity. Collect meeting notes in the parking lot and return to them later.

In Stormz, you can really feel that the tool has been built with facilitators in mind. For move involved meetings and interactive sessions, we definitely recommend it as a bespoke alternative to Miro and Mural.

Key Features of Stormz

• Digital workshop and meeting facilitation.
• Collaborative activities and exercises.
• Real-time brainstorming and decision-making tools.

How much does Stormz cost?

Stormz has a 10-day free trial and then costs $10 per month with 10 participants per session.

ClickUp: Meeting Task and Project Management

Best project meeting platform

ClickUp is a versatile task and project management software that can play a significant role in meeting management by streamlining task assignments, tracking progress, and facilitating collaboration.

If you’re looking for an all in one solution that can help you keep your team organized more broadly, ClickUp is a great tool to consider.

You can easily assign tasks and manage projects, and initiatives. Tailor workflows to match your meeting management processes. Customize task statuses, assignees, and due dates.

Foster teamwork with communication tools, such as comments, task discussions, and file sharing. You can even track the time spent on various tasks and generate reports to assess productivity and resource allocation.

Key Features of ClickUp:

• Task and project management.
• Customizable workflows.
• Collaboration and communication tools.

How much does does ClickUp cost?

ClickUp’s paid plans start at $10 per user, per month, though it also has a free plan if you wish to test the platform.

Klaxoon: Transform Meetings with Interactive Tools

Best tool for interactive meetings

Klaxoon is a versatile meeting management software that focuses on transforming traditional meetings into interactive and engaging experiences.

Klaxoon offers a range of interactive tools such as quizzes, surveys, word clouds, and brainstorming boards to keep participants engaged and encourage collaboration. For online meetings where you want to encourage active participation, meeting management tools that include quizzes and polls are a wonderful place to begin.

You can also collaborative boards to gather ideas, feedback, and input from participants, making it easier to make informed decisions. Collect real-time feedback and conduct surveys to gauge participant opinions and measure meeting effectiveness.

With Klaxoon, you can take your meetings to the next level by leveraging interactive tools and collaborative features, ultimately improving the overall meeting experience and driving better outcomes.

Key Features of Klaxoon:

• Interactive meeting tools and activities.
• Collaboration and brainstorming boards.
• Real-time feedback and surveys.
• Integration with various apps and platforms.
• Analytics and reporting.

How much does Klaxoon cost?

Klaxoon has a free plan to help you get started with 50 participants. Paid plans for Klaxoon’s more robust features start at $24.90 per month.

Why is Meeting Management important?

Meetings have long been a staple of business and organizational life, providing a platform for collaboration, decision-making, and communication. However, not all meetings are created equal.

Organized badly, meetings can be a waste of time that leaves team members feeling drained and less aligned. Plan and organize a meeting well and your team can achieve great things and stay on time while doing do. This is where effective meeting management comes into play.

Meeting management refers to the process of planning, organizing, facilitating, and following up on meetings to ensure they are productive, efficient, and valuable. It might seem like a straightforward task, but there are several compelling reasons why effective meeting management is of paramount importance.

When a manager or facilitator uses the right meeting management software, meetings tend to flow. Teams are aligned on the agenda, meeting materials are easily created, meeting notes are collected and managers have everything the need to run the session.

In this section, we’ll share the benefits of using the right tools during every step of your meeting process and explore why you should start using a solution to help support your process.

Optimizes Time and Resources

Meetings take time to plan, organize and run. Good meetings are those that feel like an effective use of the collective time and resources of everyone involved. When thinking about running a team meeting, remember that the time used is cumulative for everyone in the session. A one-hour meeting with ten team members can cost your hundreds of dollars in working time. That time should be spent effectively and productively!

Meeting management software is designed to optimize the process and save you time in the process. For example, reusing and adapting a SessionLab meeting agenda can help you create a perfectly-timed agenda in minutes, rather than hours.

Planning and structuring your team meetings effectively can ensure you discuss what’s important, rather than going off on tangents that take you further from your goal. Effective meeting management ensures that meetings are focused, concise, and end on time, making the best use of everyone’s time.

The best meeting management software also makes it easy to do all the tangential tasks relating to your meeting. There’s always something for managers to do, and so saving time here can be a life saver. Whether its collating meeting notes, sending invites, creating beautiful meeting materials or assigning tasks, using meeting software can help optimize this process.

Enhances Productivity

Well-planned and managed meetings help teams get more done. They have a clear agenda, defined objectives, and a structured flow. This allows participants to stay on track, make decisions efficiently, and accomplish the meeting’s goals. Unproductive meetings, on the other hand, can lead to frustration and reduced morale among participants.

I often think of meeting management software as the second facilitator in the room. Have a question about what comes next? Check your agenda. Want to quickly poll participants? Use the engagement features of your tool to make the process quicker. Want to timebox each activity to make sure you cover everything needed? Use a time tracker connected to your session plan.

Meeting management tools are a great way to support your process and improve meeting productivity, all while saving you valuable time and effort.

Promotes Accountability and Ownership

Accountability and Ownership are cornerstones of successful organizations. Get your team behind a new initiative and have team members assigned to follow-up tasks and your projects will be more successful as a result. Good meetings and workshops are often where this accountability and buy-in begins.

Have you ever been in a meeting where you had a nice chat about an upcoming initiative, but it felt like you had no clear idea about what you should do next? Effective meetings enable your team and incentivize action. Great meeting management software can help you by making it easy to set action items, responsibilities, and create clearly defined and documented deadlines.

You can go further by inviting collaborators to co-create your agenda, lead sections of the meeting or give feedback on your plan. A great agenda is one that everyone involved believes in. Getting your team involved in shaping your agendas can have profound effects on team productivity and buy-in.

Encourages Participation and Engagement

Ever been in a meeting where you unintentionally got distracted, just because it was dull? Or perhaps you were trying to get feedback on a new project and were met with silence? Managing a great meeting also includes encouraging active participation and finding ways to engage your audience as necessary.

You can achieve this on multiple levels. Designing your agenda with space to check-in and warm-up participants with activities is a great first step. You might also consider how each item of your meeting flows into the next and tailor your plan to the task at hand. Sending your agenda to participants ahead of time can also ensure they’re prepared to contribute and engage with the topic of your session.

Meeting management software can help encourage participation during the meeting too. You might use a whiteboard for team members to collaborate in real-time. Using quick polls or idea generation games can make a session more intriguing. Something as simple as sharing videos or slides while video conferencing can help hold participants’ attention.

Remember that dropping everyone into a video conferencing tool and talking at them for an hour without variation or participatory activities is a surefire way to have a bad meeting. Use a meeting management tool to help facilitate engagement and active participation throughout the process.

Transparency and knowledge sharing

Transparency is vital for creating a sense of trust and credibility within your team. In the context of meetings, being transparent means making sure that the agenda and supporting information are shared openly and that decisions and notes are documented clearly. Management software can help support this process by making it easy to control who sees what and making it easy to invite people to your agenda and meeting notes.

A meeting management tool like SessionLab can be a great place to keep all your meeting agendas organized. You can reuse your best agendas, share notes and ensure consistency across your organization. Of course, you may have meetings that want to remain private or within certain groups, such as one on one meetings or executive sessions. A good meeting management solution allows you to control who sees what, and invite only those people you want to each agenda or workspace.

Your organization and team will likely create your own rituals and best practices around your meetings. The way you manage meetings in your team doesn’t need to be the same as everyone else (though there’s lots to learn from others) but it does help to be consistent within your group. Your meeting platform will help you achieve this with templates, instructions and by taking the pain out of sharing your best practices.

Conclusion: Optimize Your Meetings with the Right Software

There’s more to an effective meeting than simply getting people in the room. Video calls without structure or planning are rarely productive and seldom help a team achieve their goals.

Effective meeting management software is an essential component of the process, enabling meeting leaders to plan, organize and run sessions with confidence.

Whether you need help with agenda creation, note-taking, scheduling, collaboration, or engagement, the right tools can significantly impact your meeting outcomes. SessionLab is an effective way to start creating and sharing better meeting agendas and supercharging your entire meeting process.

Have thoughts or recommendations? Let us know how you get on in the comments below. Want more help with the cultivating the skills you need to run your meetings? Learn how to become a better facilitator and improve how you hold the space and execute meetings.

Looking for inspiration? Check out our workshop and meeting templates to see how to structure an effective session and use it as the basis for your next meeting.

In this guide, we’ll explore instructional design software tools that help learning designers at every stage of the process. From creating a learning flow and conduct needs assessments all the way through to creating training videos, hosting your courses and measuring the impact, you’ll find a tool to help here.

Innovative organizations full of happy and productive employees often have one thing in common: opportunities for their team to develop new skills and grow in their careers.

As LinkedIn’s 2023 learning report noted, 89% of L&D professionals agree that building employee skills will help organizations navigate the evolving future of work. 94% of employees are likely to stay at a company longer if there is an investment in the their development.

Learning and development programs, training sessions and elearning courses are all popular ways to help upskill teams, but how are they made? What instructional design software exists to help an instructional designer or learning team create effective materials, source input and evaluate the impact?

Read on to discover software to help you streamline your workflow and build more impactful materials at each stage of the instructional design process.

What is instructional design software?

Instructional design software includes a host of specialized tools designed to facilitate the development and distribution of learning content and materials. These tools can range from content authoring tools and video editing software all the way through to learning management systems and interactive learning platforms. 

Depending on the needs of the training or learning process at hand, you may need one or multiple instructional design tools in order to create, organize and deliver the most effective learning programs for your teams and clients. 

I find it easiest to first consider the entire instructional design process and see where tools might be deployed to streamline processes and facilitate the work of a learning team.

Starting with design, instructional designers first need tools to help them map out an effective learning flow and ensure their program will help meet training goals. Pen and paper might work for some designers, but learning design tools like SessionLab can help you create and organize complex learning programs with ease. 

Once a solid learning plan has been drafted, instructional designers need to turn that plan into content that will engage learners. This can include creating training videos, software simulations, interactive games or simply enriching written training content with images and interactive elements such as quizzes.

For self-serve courses and learning programs, you’ll also need somewhere to host the materials so trainees can access them and so you can track learning progress. In the case of trainer-led or blended learning programs, you’ll likely employ additional tools to help support the trainer during delivery and to make that training more engaging for participants too.

At every stage, instructional designers will likely need to source material from subject matter experts and collaborate on copy. They’ll also need a place to store files, collect copy and training materials and project manage a process with many moving parts. 

In this guide, we’ll categorize instructional design software by its role in the instructional design process so you can find the right tool for your needs. On-site training has a different set of needs than on-demand learning programs and your choice of instructional design software tools will naturally reflect this. 

The different types of instructional design software are:

Learning design tools

Content authoring tools are primarily designed for packaging together multimedia, text, links and more into a format you can then feed into your LMS, but they’re not always the best bet for designing effective learning flows.

Instructional design professionals often need a space to collaboratively design a learning flow with subject matter experts while ensuring each activity works together and actually helps achieve your learning goals. 

This is where a tool designed to help you create and easily overview your learning flow, organize timings and collaborate on content before moving towards an LMS is important.

SessionLab

SessionLab is an effective tool for designing your learning flow. Quickly outline and adjust your instructional design by dragging and dropping your blocks.

See your entire learning flow in one-screen and colour code by activity type to make informed design decisions. Need to iterate on your curriculum? With SessionLab, you can instantly adjust by simply reordering your blocks. 

Stay in control of timing. Set the timing of each activity and instantly see the duration of your full training module. When you need to make changes, SessionLab automatically calculates your timing so you can ensure your trainers and content authors can create and deliver content with confidence. 

Collaborate on your learning design in one-place. Sourcing content from subject matter experts and creating an effective learning flow can be challenge if you need to send emails back and forth or have many versions of your course design.

With SessionLab, it’s easy to create a single source of truth for your course design and update it in one place. Add attachments, research, media files and links to specific training blocks. Invite subject matter experts, content creators and instructional designers to collaborate in real-time or leave comments and complete your course design asynchronously. 

Once your training content has been approved, export your instructional design materials in the format that works for you. Using an LMS? Invite your team to your session or export your material to clipboard, Word, Powerpoint or PDF. 

Delivering materials for a face-to-face training program? Easily create a beautiful, customized run-sheet with clear instructions and timings to make your training design easy to follow and deliver. You can even add your designs to a team library for other designers to re-use, adapt and save even more time on future instructional designs.

SessionLab cost

SessionLab has a free forever plan. Paid plans including features like unlimited sessions, real-time collaboration and a team content library start at $15 per month.

Google Sheets 

For some instructional designers, planning a learning flow in a spreadsheet is still an effective way to structure their course material. What Google Sheets lacks in features it makes up for in accessibility. Most folks know how to use a spreadsheet, and being able to quickly structure your entire learning flow by entering text and filling cells has its advantages. 

That said, as soon as you want to add timing calculations, materials and collaborate with subject matter experts, the limitations of such a tool become apparent.

For folks just starting out or who prefer to quickly sketch out a learning flow, Sheets is a great way to get started, though it lacks many of the time-saving features of dedicated instructional design tools. 

Google Sheets cost

Google Sheets is free!

MindMeister

For visual thinkers, mind mapping tools can be a useful addition to their collection of instructional design software tools. They can be an effective way to create a first draft of your instructional design, allowing you to cluster ideas, link them together and design a learning flow you can then refine into a complete design. MindMeister is a great choice of lightweight instructional design tool that can support the first draft and learning design part of the process.

While some folks prefer pen and paper or a tool like SessionLab that allows you to easily go from first idea all the way through to a completed training design with timings and content attached, you might find room for a mind mapping tool in your stack.

MindMeister cost

MindMeister‘s paid plans start at $4.99 per month.

Content authoring platforms 

Once you’ve designed an ideal learning flow and sourced supplementary materials, you’ll need to package everything together into an attractive, engaging course. Content authoring platforms are tools designed to help you get self-paced, asynchronous courses and training into a format that’s ready to share and host elsewhere.

In these tools, you’ll often bring your learning flow to life with images, video content, interactive quizzes and more. These tools typically integrate with learning management systems and make it easy for instructional designers and multimedia teams to turn their content into a visually appealing and engaging course.

Articulate Storyline 360

Articulate Storyline 360 hosts a whole suite of tools designed to help advanced instructional designers create engaging courses and training materials. With applications like Storyline and Rise, the Articulate 360 suite is especially effective at creating interactive and responsive courses that you can plug right into your LMS.

The platform’s robust features, user-friendly interface, and extensive template library make it a go-to choice for instructional designers creating visually appealing and engaging learning content for a large-scale organization. Create quizzes, training videos and other key elearning elements, all without any coding knowledge and an intuitive user interface.

Articulate Storyline 360 Cost

Articulate 360 has various plans for freelancers, companies and academic institutions. Plans for freelancers start at $1,099 per user, annually and $1399 for teams. 

Elucidat

Elucidat is a content authoring platform that prioritizes collaborative instructional design in the cloud. Its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality make it easy for teams to create responsive and visually appealing e-learning content that works on many devices.

Elucidat’s analytics tools also provide valuable insights into learner engagement and performance, enabling designers to refine and optimize their content based on real-time data. Designed for Enterprises and L&D teams operating at scale, it’s a good choice for large teams who need robust tools, though its cost is similarly large. 

Elucidat cost

Custom quote. 

Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate stands out as a versatile content authoring platform with a focus on creating immersive and interactive learning experiences. With features like virtual reality (VR) capabilities and smart learning interactions, Adobe Captivate empowers instructional designers to go beyond traditional e-learning.

The platform’s responsive design and multimedia capabilities make it an excellent choice for creating engaging content that resonates with learners, especially if your media teams are already invested in the Adobe suite.

You’ll find a heap of templates and ready-to-go slides and a cost that is far more accessible to freelancers and consultants. If you’re a learning designer working with small teams or who doesn’t have a large budget or existing team for multimedia design, Adobe Captivate is a great choice.

Adobe Captivate cost 

Adobe Captivate pricing starts at $33.99 per month for individual users and includes a 30-day free trial. 

iSpring Suite

iSping Suite is simple yet powerful instructional design software that will be immediately familiar to anyone creating powerpoint presentations. It’s a great content authoring tool for instructional design that helps you easily create courses, interactive presentations, assessments, video training and more.

An experienced instructional designer will find robust features here, though you’ll find a learning curve that will you help you quickly create great training courses even as a newbie. It’s easy to export to SCORM and we also loved the ability to create ebooks with attractive flipbook effects to help engage learners. You’ll also find a content library to help you create professional instructional materials at speed.

iSpring Suite cost

iSpring Suite plans start at $770 per user per month.

Video recording and editing software 

Most self-paced training courses and learning materials include video content of some kind. Instructional designers might typically create video demonstrations of tools and processes or include presentations of learning material to better engage learners and add variation to a training program. The tools collected below are designed to help instructional designers create, edit and share videos to use in their training materials.

Depending on your course and needs, your choice of video tool might vary. Simple screen recording software such as Loom can be sufficient when creating supplementary video materials. On the other hand, if your course is primarily delivered via video, you may want a tool that makes it easy to create and edit professional content to a high standard or house style. 

Determine the needs of your learners and your training flow when choosing a video tool – professional video content is important but a screenshare of a powerpoint presentation or a walkthrough of a tool can be just as impactful as a custom animation. It’s also easy to get carried away and spend forever creating beautiful videos that never get watched. Match your tool to the scope of your training so you can be efficient and effective when creating your materials. 

Loom 

Loom is a versatile screen recording and video creation platform that doubles as a valuable content authoring tool, especially for learning designers helping teams learn new tools. At SessionLab, Loom has become a valuable knowledge transfer tool by making it easy to quickly record and present items to other team members. We’ll often embed a Loom right into our Notion pages or learning platforms. 

For learning designers who need lightweight video materials and screen recordings to support their training and internal processes, it’s an easy-to-use tool that can easily find a place in your toolkit. We especially love the AI-powered transcription and summary taking features – it really speeds up the process of creating materials anyone on the team can access.

Loom cost

Loom has a free plan for getting started and has a business plan starting at $12.50 per user per month.

Camtasia

Camtasia is powerful yet easy to use software for editing video content that allows content creators to elevate their materials with effects, transitions and other assets.

For advanced instructional designers seeking to create engaging videos that can form the core part of their training, Camtasia is a worthwhile investment. Many reviewers mention that the tool is easy to use and teach others and with a simple drag and drop interface, it can make the process of scaling video creation quick and easy. 

Camtasia cost 

Camtasia plans start at $179.88 for a yearly subscription or $299 for a perpetual subscription. 

Movavi Video Suite Business

For instructional designers who want the most professional and attractive looking video content in their courses, Movavi provides a powerful suite of tools that can also speed up the creation process. 

Movavi has helpful features for everything from simple screen recording to support for video conferences, webinars and more. Incorporating text, voiceovers and effects into your video content is easy, and it also supports the use of AI upscaling, motion tracking and advanced export features to ensure your videos are the best we can be.

We loved that Movavi has various versions based on your needs, so you don’t need to buy-into a complex suite if all you need is simple video editing.

Movavi cost 

Movavi features a whole suite of tools that can be purchased individually or as part of a bundle. As of writing, Movavi’s Video Suite Business subscription starts at $309.95. That said, their plans are often discounted and you can contact their Sales team for bulk discounts too. 

Webinar and video chat software

In addition to developing self-paced courses, many instructional designers create materials to deliver directly to learners in training sessions and workshops. In an increasingly remote and hybrid working environment, it’s vital for trainers to have powerful software for delivering training webinars and virtual sessions. These tools are great for any trainers and learning designers who need to deliver material to learners in a live environment. 

Beyond standard features like screen sharing and recording, the best webinar software also includes features to help create learning engagement, such as polls, quizzes and integrations with online whiteboards and collaboration tools.

When choosing your video chat tool, always consider the needs and proficiencies of your target audience. Simple tools that they already use might be better than introducing something new with all the bells and whistles. Think about the ideal learning experience for your trainees and pick a tool that best supports those goals. 

Zoom

Zoom has become a go-to video conferencing tool for many teams and instructional designers. It includes most of the features you’ll need when hosting webinars and virtual training such as screensharing, recording and simple engagement tools. Because so many people are familiar with it, it’s easy to get on with leading your sessions, rather than needing to teach people how to use it.

The only caveat is for instructional designers who might be hosting courses for members of the public. Managing attendees and payments before a session and understanding audience drop-off isn’t easy in Zoom, and you might find another tool better serves your needs. That said, for internal L&D teams and consultants delivering training to a single client, Zoom is a solid, dependable choice of instructional design software.

Zoom cost

Zoom has a limited free plan and paid plans starting at $14.99 per host, per month. Note that for hosting webinars and bigger events, you may need to upgrade to one of their more advanced plans.

Big Marker

Big Marker is a great tool for creating virtual events and webinars. For trainers and educators who may wish to incorporate live sessions into their training programs or need to manage attendees effectively, Big Marker is a great choice. You’ll find all the core features you expect from video conferencing software such as event chat, polls, Q&As and handouts. You’ll also be able to host your recordings in a learning hub for participants to access in the future.

Big Marker takes a little time to learn, but the pay-off is a powerful tool that can easily service the needs of trainers running events with ticketing and sponsor needs. It’s also great for internal teams whose cohort based learning programs have a mix of live events and recorded material. 

Big Marker Cost

Big Marker offers various plans you can tailor based on whether you’re creating live webinars, ticketed events, learning hubs, or all three. Contact them for a custom quote. 

SpatialChat

In real life, trainers and facilitators are able to create spaces that can be conducive to learning and can help create connections between learners. When running virtual training sessions, this can be a little trickier. SpatialChat is a video conferencing tool that works spatially, so participants can move around, talk to people close to them and even navigate a virtual office or event space. 

In SpatialChat, you’re able to customize your virtual space, run presentations, send people into breakouts and simulate some of the magic of an in-person event. Leave up artifacts created by your trainees in the virtual space and share Google Docs and Miro boards without leaving the virtual classroom.

For cohort-based learning where conversations and activities between trainees are fundamental to your learning design, SpatialChat is well worth your consideration. 

SpatialChat Cost

SpatialChat has a free plan to help you get started, though for instructional designers running ongoing training and a need for a virtual space, you’ll likely want to check out their paid plans, starting at $3.50 per user, per month.

Survey tools

At various points in your instructional design process, you’ll need to gather input from trainees, staff and clients. You may source input for a training needs assessment before creating your instructional design. You might also survey trainees during your training program or in a virtual training session to support your training content. Once you’ve delivered the training, it’s also a great idea to collect feedback so you

While your LMS or content authoring tool may have some features to help you get feedback for completed training, if you need to collect input at other points in your process, a bespoke tool that integrates well and supports your process can be a worthwhile investment. 

Typeform

A visually appealing survey that people actually fill in can make all the difference when conducting a training needs assessment or collecting feedback on your course. Typeform offers a simple, visual survey builder that makes it easy to create effective surveys at speed. You can create a brand style, build custom survey flows based on participant input and easily integrate with your chosen spreadsheet tool. 

At SessionLab, we particularly love Typeform’s analytics features. You can easily see your survey completion rate, understand where people fall off and what questions they skip and use these insights to improve your survey. Combine this power with the ease of sharing and embedding your surveys and Typeform is a great choice of survey tool for many instructional designers. 

Typeform cost 

Typeform’s paid plans start at $25 per month though it also features a free plan to give you a taste of their tool.

Jotform

For learning designers looking for more control over their surveys and who may also want to build simple apps to support their training programs, Jotform is a solid choice. 

You can get started with a simple online quiz or survey template, though when you need more power, Jotform has you covered. You can create conditional logic, generate custom reports, process payments and even include custom widgets to speed-up your workflow. Want people who left a low feedback score to have the option to book a Calendly meeting from inside your survey? In Jotform you can do that. 

Jotform definitely falls on the more complex side of learning design software, but if you have custom needs based on your business or training program, the power it offers can be well worth the effort.

Jotform cost 

Jotform has a free plan with up to 5 forms and 100 responses. Paid plans for Jotform start at $34 per month. 

Google Forms

Need a free online survey tool that is easy to learn and share? Google Forms is a simple, easy-to-use survey tool that trainers can use to create surveys in minutes. Share a Google Form link in emails to participants to quickly get simple feedback though note that for more advanced data collection or embedding and reporting, paid tools might be more better suited to your needs.

While it lacks powerful features and can’t be visually customized to match your brand or company, for trainers who need a simple, free tool, Google Forms is easy to recommend. 

Google Forms cost 

Google Forms is completely free to use! 

Learning management systems (LMS)

A learning management system is a platform for hosting, managing and tracking learning programs and training content.

Typically, these tools provide a hub that allows learners to engage in self-paced courses, sign-up for instructor facilitated learning, start discussions with other learners, access supporting materials and track their progress. For instructional designers, an LMS is where your created materials are hosted and used by learners and instructors. 

While one-off training sessions are unlikely to require a whole LMS to run them, for learning designers in a corporate or educational environment, an LMS is a vital part of your ongoing learning and development strategy.  

TalentLMS

For SMEs setting up a learning and development program, the scale of the task can be overwhelming. Tools that are powerful but easy to use can really help your teams create change at speed and ensure you develop your team effectively. 

TalentLMS has a host of features for making it easy to compile your course materials and learning flow into an effective course. You can add images, videos, tests, quizzes and more in their drag and drop builder and upload file types from your content authoring system too.

When it comes to creating learning paths as part of an ongoing L&D plan, TalentLMS has you covered too. Create personalized pathways and completion rules to help guide learners and meet your training goals. Set-up automations and track training efficacy with custom reports to help streamlining and improve your training programs. 

TalentLMS cost

TalentLMS starts at $ 69 /month for up to 40 users. 

360Learning

360Learning is one of the most trusted names in talent development and with good reason. It hosts a whole suite of tools that can allow an instructional designer or an L&D team to run their entire program from one place.

The LMS portion of 360Learning has powerful features to automate your learning program and integrate your training with your existing HR and CRM tools. It supports SCORM imports from other tools and has features for blended learning pathways too so however your program functions, it can find a home here.

Bring in 360Learning’s AI powered content authoring and academy options and everyone from SMEs to universities can find features to help them create a culture of collaborative learning. 

360Learning cost 

360Learning’s LMS starts at $8 per user, per month. For larger companies who wish to use many of the more powerful features may need the Business plan, which has a custom quote. 

Blackboard Learn

For many of us who attended higher education in the last 20 years, Blackboard has been a familiar part of our learning journeys. Blackboard Learn is an LMS that focuses on the needs to educational institutions and instructional designers operating within those systems.

As part of the Anthology product suite, institutions are able to manage everything from student enrolment, classroom engagement and course materials as well as accreditation and testing. 

As a tool designed for learners of all different backgrounds and proficiency levels, Blackboard has an emphasis on creating a user-friendly learning environment that also enables instructors to deliver great experiences. For instructional designers working in education or whose materials take a more blended approach, Blackboard is a powerful option of LMS.

Blackboard Learn cost

Blackboard Learn has a 30-day free trial, though institutions will need to get in touch with them for a custom quote. 

Presentation tools 

Visual presentations and slide decks are a common way trainers and learning designers deliver training materials to participants.

Whether it’s a live session or a recording, creating an effective visual presentation can help engage learners and make it easier to understand complex concepts or large amounts of information. Here are some of our favourite presentation tools for instructional design.

PowerPoint 

Microsoft PowerPoint is a slide presentation tool that is used by a large number of facilitators, trainers and learning designers. (It was heavily featured in our own State of Facilitation report). It’s an industry standard tool with everything you’d expect from a presentation tool. It’s easy to quickly build effective presentations, embed media files and have control over your slides while delivering.

You’ll also find a host of templates and AI powered assistance in the form of copilot, helping you make attractive presentations at speed. While some of its features may feel a bit old-school compared to newer competitors, you’ll find an effective tool in PowerPoint. 

PowerPoint cost 

Microsoft PowerPoint has a free plan for single users though it also comes as part of a Microsoft 365 business subscription which starts at $8.25 per user per month. 

Pitch 

Beautiful, easy-to-understand presentations can significantly impact how learners engage with your training content. Pitch is a powerful, easy-to-use presentation tool with an emphasis on creating engaging content in a collaboration friendly environment. Whether you’re completing slide decks with subject matter experts or hosting live training sessions where you want participants to take part on the board, Pitch has you covered. 

Pitch is also very useful when creating materials for learners to browse at their own speed. You can send custom invitation links, track who’s accessed the material and easily organize comments and questions too. 

Pitch cost

Pitch has a free forever plan for teams getting started. It’s paid plans start at $20 per month. 

Visme 

Visme is an effective tool for creating presentations, but it can also help instructional design teams with creating other assets, such as infographics, graphs and more.

The speed at which you can build attractive presentations is a massive boon in Visme. It’s easy to just drag and drop assets from their library or use a previous presentation as a starting point. Using presentations as a background for a recording? Visme’s Presenter Studio lets you create and record presentations in one-place. 

For instructional designers whose presentations form a central part of their course materials, Visme is an excellent choice. There’s no steep learning curve, it has a heap of features to help create attractive supporting materials and you can even important from PowerPoint too! 

Visme cost

Visme has a free plan with unlimited projects but limited assets. Paid plans start at $12.25 per user, per month. 

Graphics and infographics tools

Whatever style of instructional design is being delivered, you’ll likely need some learning design software to support your content with attractive visuals and graphics. These can range from simple graphs and breakdowns to complex illustrations, infographics and visual learning aids. 

In this section, we’ll share some of our favourite instructional design software for creating or sourcing visuals and infographics.

Canva

In the past, instructional designers often needed to enlist the help of professional designers for even the most simple supporting materials. With tools like Canva, this is no longer the case.

In Canva, it’s easy to create attractive visuals and graphics to support your courses. You can easily drag and drop assets, use templates When creating highly detailed infographics, Canva can fall down and it can be tricky to micromanage every detail of a complex design. It’s a great all-rounder but dependant on your needs, you may tools that offer greater a more bespoke feature set and greater degrees of control.

Canva cost

Canva has a free plan, though if you want to have complete access to the asset library and use some of their more powerful features, paid plans start at $11.99 per person. 

Vennage

If you’re looking for learning design software that will help you create pixel perfect infographics and other graphics for your courses, Vennage is a great tool to check out. Their infographic maker is simple to use, even if you have low design skills. It’s easy to drag in different assets, graph types and data visualizations and create an attractive design quickly. 

You’ll also find lots of features to support your other graphic needs: mind maps, spider diagrams and timelines are also easy to make in Vennage. For courses where you need bespoke diagrams and infographics, you’ll find everything you need here.

Vennage cost

Vennage has a free plan supporting up to 5 designs. Paid plans start at $10 per user, per month. 

Freepik

Need stock photos and illustrations fast? FreePik is a great source of illustrations, photographs and vector graphics you can easily incorporate into your training materials. You can even find professional quality video materials.

While it’s unlikely that you’ll find everything you need to support your course here, Freepik is a great place to quickly find attractive assets to slot in alongside bespoke learning materials. You might source high-quality stock images to use as backgrounds, cover images or to simply break up longer sections of text with  illustrations when you don’t want to overload learners. 

Freepik cost

Freepik allows users to download up to 10 images per day for free so long as you attribute them correctly. Paid plans with unlimited downloads and premium assets start at $12 per month. 

Adobe InDesign 

We’ve heard from many learning design teams who still swear by the power and control offered by Adobe InDesign. While there’s a steeper learning curve than many of the other tools on the market, InDesign is a professional level learning design tool that teams often use to create ebooks, training gudies and other supporting materials that contain graphics.  

InDesign integrates well with the rest of the Adobe suite and has many powerful features for creating training materials that look especially great when printed.

Many teams will also pair InDesign will Adobe Illustrator or Canva: using InDesign to bring copy and graphics together into an attractive page layout. If your learners and students require printed learning materials and your content isn’t constantly changing, Adobe InDesign is still one of the most powerful tools on the market.

Adobe InDesign cost 

Adobe InDesign’s paid plans start at $22.99/month, but they also offer significant discounts for students and educators. 

Interactive learning and engagement tools

Educators and learning designers have always used games and interactive learning tools to supplement their in-person courses and training programs. In virtual and self-paced learning environments, interactivty is arguably even more important. These kinds of learning design tools help designers create opportunities to engage learners and add variation to their learning flow. 

In this section, you’ll find tools that range from simple quiz creators and engagement tools to entire platforms designed to create an interactive learning environment. While many elearning authoring tools and LMS do include plugins and tools for adding simple quizzes and interactive elements, sometimes a bespoke tool is your best bet, especially for trainers running live courses and seminars.

Kahoot 

For trainers and educators creating an experitential learning environment, engaging games and simulations can be an important part of their courses and training programs.

Kahoot is a virtual engagement platform that makes it easy to create and share interactive quizzes, puzzles and more to your training sessions and courses. You have options that allow you to run live games in your virtual classroom or host self-paced games as part of on-demand learning. These games run great on desktop or mobile and on some of the higher tier plans, you can even create Kahoots directly from a PDF.  

If you want to add simple and engaging quizzes to your sessions without needing to tie it into your LMS, Kahoot is a great choice of a powerful yet lightweight tool. 

Kahoot cost

Kahoot offers various plans based on your sector and your required features. Plans start at $3.99 per month for teachers and $17per host, per month for businesses.

Trivie 

Trivie is a relatively new platform for instructional designers interested in using gamification and social learning to supercharge their development programs. Trivia positions themselves as an alternative to a traditional LMS, with features such as peer-to-peer learning tools, badges and leaderboards and smart analytics to identify risks and learning opportunities.

For organizations setting up a talent development program and who want something lean, modern and potentially more engaging, Trivie is worthy of consideration. We also loved their flat approach to pricing and AI powered training suggestions that can help automate and streamline employee training flows. 

Trivie cost

Trivie has a free trial with unlimited learners and its paid plans start at $499 for 100 learners. 

Go4Clic 

Go4Clic is an e-learning platform designed to help instructional designers and corporate trainers create active learning environments with ease.

One of their banner features are their interactive, timed challenges, which are designed to increase engagement and participation among groups, communities and cohorts. You’ll also find powerful dashboards to help you make strategic, data-driven decisions and tools designed to streamline your workflow and deliver value to clients at speed.

For those of you with training businesses, you can also set-up payments, certificates and integrations with other tools to help streamline and empower your courses. 

Go4Clic cost 

Go4Clic offers a free trial, with paid plans starting at $39.00/month.

Menitmeter 

Mentimeter is an effective engagement tool used by educators and trainers to encourage participation with live polling, surveys, games and more. You can easily create quizzes on the fly and display responses in word clouds instantly, adding an engaging and dynamic element to your live sessions. You can also create presentations, export data for use in reports and easily integrate your surveys in video tools like Zoom. 

Mentimeter is also extremely popular among facilitators: it was the engagement tool most referenced by respondents to the State of Factiliation 2024 survey.  

Menitmeter cost 

Mentimeter has a free plan for up to 50 participants, with paid plans starting at $17.99. 

Project management tools  

Creating an entire learning and development program is no simple task. There are often a lot of moving parts, and a need to project manage the instructional design process from first draft through to release and evaluation.

For many designers, project management is likely to happen in a centralized company tool to allow oversight and collaboration between teams. For freelance designers and learning professionals, a more lightweight solution can often be sufficient to support your process. 

Notion

Notion is a powerful tool for everything from documentation to project management. It’s even possible to host lightweight, document based training and onboarding directly in Notion. We use Notion in SessionLab as a place to collect our knowledge and manage our work. It’s easy to create custom databases, kanbans and anything else you need to manage even the most complex projects.

For organizations already invested in Notion, it’s a natural fit. If you’re looking for a new project management tool and a place to collect documentation and course materials, Notion might be the tool you’re looking for. 

Notion cost

Notion has a free plan for individual users (great if you’re a solo learning designer!) and paid plans for teams starting at $8 per user / month.

Asana

Asana is a well-known tool in the project management world with good reason. It’s easy for teams to get started and see value quickly while also having the power to connect projects and tasks with high level goals. Managing individual tasks and responsibilities as part of a greater workflow is easy in Asana.

Asana also has helpful additional features like time tracking and automated workflow management that can make completing your learning designs faster. For organizations who want to work cross-departmentally and have a high level overview of how every project connects to long-term strategy, Asana is a great fit. 

Asana cost 

Asana has a free individual plan to help you get started out. Their paid plans begin at $10.99 per user per month.

Trello

For project managers and instructional designers who like to think in boards, cards and timelines, Trello is an effective and easy-to-use project management tool.

They focus on providing many different views for your data and projects, so you can present the information you need in the way that best allows you to organize and complete tasks. You can add labels to let collaborators see priority or which part of the instructional design process a task is in.

Trello can also be used as a resource hub, which can be great for small teams collecting resources for a course or learning program. While Trello offers lots of power, it’s also very easy to get started and it functions perfectly for small teams. 

Trello cost 

Trello has a free plan that’s great for small projects. Trello paid plans start at $5 per month. 

Online course platforms

If you’re an instructional designer who wants to create custom elearning courses and sell them to the public or your existing community, you might also want to make use of an online course platform or marketplace.

Instructional design software in this category falls into two categories: platforms that help you build and publish interactive courses you can host on your website and marketplaces where you create online courses to share with the existing audience on the platform.

Both sets of instruction design software tools have features design to help you assemble your elearning courses, make them engaging and share them with your audience. If you’re an instructional designer creating corporate training, these tools can be a great alternative to a whole LMS. In effect, you sacrifice some of the control and SCORM compatibility for the ease of authoring and hosting an entire course in one-place.

If you’re a freelance learning designer looking to create responsive courses and bolster your training business, these tools can streamline the whole process for you and also help you find an audience.

Teachable

Teachable offers a great platform for creating, hosting and selling interactive courses and elearning material. You’re able to create online courses, run a coaching business, offer digital downloads and create a whole school with many different learning opportunities.

In Teachable, it’s easy to create courses and manage payments and memberships from one place. For a freelance instructional designer or coach who wants to create and sell material or develop elearning courses on behalf of a client who may want to easily host them, Teachable is a solid option.

For L&D teams creating training programs for their organization, Teachable may lack some features of other instructional design software for you though it would still support this use case. Give it a try if you’re looking for a solution that may include creating an academy or education setting feel within your program.

Teachable cost

Teachable starts at $39 per month with a free plan to get you started.

LearnWorlds

Many instructional design software tools share common elements, even while they may specialize in a few areas. LearnWorlds is a complete elearning platform that does lots of thing wells. It’s easy to create interactive training videos, bring them together in a community learning space or school and share it with your employees, customers or community.

LearnWorlds is highly flexible, SCORM compliant, and if you’re looking for instructional design software that is feature complete and can also allow you to serve both internal and external training needs, LearnWorlds is worthy of your attention. It has advanced features to help you throughout the process and may even allow you to drop separate elearning authoring tools in favour of using a single platform.

LearnWorlds cost

LearnWorlds pricing plans start at $24 per month, though note this includes transaction fees for course sales. You may need to upgrade to the higher tier plans, particular if you need instructional design software to support your organization internally.

Mighty

One trend in elearning is the rise of community learning spaces and of elearning courses that feature community or cohort-based learning at the heart of their offering.

Instructional design software like Mighty (Formerly known as Mighty Networks) is designed to create a thriving community space that can support elearning courses, membership plans and other training material in one social space. You’ll find features to help you create your training courses, host live sessions and cohort networks and even build your own mobile community app, all without coding knowledge and a small learning curve.

Mighty isn’t going to be the right choice for every instructional designer. Internal learning teams may go in a more traditional route, but if you’re interested in exploring coursed-based communities, these platforms can offer a single place. Just note that some of the features you might expect from popular instructional design software might be more lightweight than in a bespoke learning management system or more robust authoring tool.

Mighty cost

Mighty paid plans start at $33/mo when paid annually.

Digital Adoption Platforms

For many organizations, training often revolves around the adoption of new tools and systems. Digital adoption platforms are expressly designed to help organizations onboard new team members, run software simulations and help employees access training while using a specific tool.

Often, the best instructional design software is that tool that best helps you achieve your training goals and create an ideal environment for your learners. A digital adoption platform that allows them to complete training while inside the tool they’ll be using can often be more effective than any interactive videos or purely written content.

Whatfix

Instructional design is often at the heart of creating and rolling out impactful organizational change. When the changes your organization is implementing revolves around new technology, better onboarding or in-app training, a bespoke tool combined with effective instructional design is often the best approach.

For in-app learning, Whatfix is among the best instructional design software on the market. Not ony does it help you build content effectively, but Whatfix’s digital adoption platform allows you to analyze the need for training and deliver contextual in-app support to your teams when needed.

Whatfix cost

Custom quote.

Pendo

Pendo is instructional design software designed to help training teams create in-app onboarding materials, on-demand support and also gain insights into how employees are using company software. Any training material needs to be developed with the end user and their needs in mind. With Pendo, learning designers are able to gain insights into employee needs and deploy in-app learning in the same place.

The best instructional design software can be vital for teams aiming to save time, streamline workflows and get data to make informed decisions about training materials. Whether you’re giving development teams advice within a production environment or adding sales training on top of your CRM, Pendo can offer a lot of value.

Pendo cost

Pendo has a free trial that allows teams to test the tool with up to 500 monthly users. Paid plans require a custom quote.

Conclusion

Instructional design is an art of balancing trainer needs and organizational goals with an engaging learning flow.

With the right instructional design software, designers and trainers can be empowered to design impactful programs, support their process and deliver exceptional learning to their teams.

We hope this guide to popular instructional design software has given you an insight into how tools can help you streamline your workflow and create impactful training materials. Is there a tool you use that’s missing from this list? Let us know below!

Want to go further? Read this guide to see a proven step-by-step process for creating an effective training session plan.

Ready to start designing your learning flow? Explore an example training agenda template built in SessionLab and adjust it to your needs.

In this guide, we’ll explore the best change management software on the market. Whether you’re looking for a complete change management hub or need a tool to improve expressly designed for the area of change you’re working on, you’ll find an effective change management tool here. 

Successfully implementing change for a team or organization means using the right tools for each part of the process. Project management software has a massive part to play, but each part of the change management process deserves a tool that is best suited for the task at hand. 

For many change managers, L&D teams and HR professionals tasked with creating meaningful change, this means having a tech stack that helps improve efficiency and move things forward at each stage of the process. 

For others, it means finding a single piece for change management software designed for managing change at scale.

Here, you’ll find a range of change management software tools that serve different industries and needs. You’ll also find advice for the kinds of change each tool is best positioned to tackle. So rather than having to trawl a list of solutions your buying team won’t approve or which won’t suit your purpose, you can easily find the right tool for your process. Let’s get started! 

How to choose the right change management software?

When it comes to choosing the right change management tool, there are a few ways to go about deciding what is right for you and your team.

I find it helpful to delineate the three kinds of work a change manager may find a tool beneficial. A successful change management process will likely require:

1. A tool for managing the change process
2. A tool for optimizing key tasks in the change management process
3. A tool for implementing and tracking the specific changes you chose to enact

Managing the change process means having a place to outline your change framework, project manage the process and ensure each step is conducted successfully.

This can be as simple as a creating a document in Notion or a project in Asana, though you might even use dedicated change management software expressly designed for overseeing each stage of the change process.

Secondly, you will ideally use change management software to help streamline the core tasks you conduct as a change manager. This might include using a survey or employee feedback tool to collect change requests, run a risk assessment or optimize the information gathering stage of your change process.

If you’re running workshops with your change advisory board or designing new training programs, you will likely benefit from using an agenda design tool like SessionLab to ensure you create engaging sessions.

Lastly, you will likely need tools to help your team, enact the change you decide to implement. For example, if you find that your team members need better training, you may use a Learning Management System to host courses and learning opportunities. If the changes you are enacting are all about adopting new technology or overhauling your IT infrastructure, a dedicated tool that will enable your dev team to do their best work is what you want.

The best change management software are those tools which closely match your process, fit into your existing tech stack and make your core work easier.

When it comes to making a final buying decision on your choice of change management software, you might also find it useful to ask yourself and your team the following questions to help ensure you’re selecting the right tool for your needs.

• What change management framework will we be following, if any?
• What tasks do I need to accomplish as part of the change management program?
• What existing tools in our stack perform this task?
• Are they fit for purpose?
• Who is responsible for enacting change and what tools will they use to enact that change?

Every organization is different and choosing the right tools often means surveying what you already have, seeing the gaps and then choosing a tool to support your process without creating redundancy.

In this guide, you’ll find change management software for all kinds of uses cases and advice which we hope will help you identify the best tool for your needs. Let’s dig in!

SessionLab: Dynamic Workshop and Training Design

Best for designing and running workshops throughout the change management process 

SessionLab provides a specialized solution for designing and facilitating impactful workshops and meetings. We help enhance collaboration and streamline the workflow for a change management team while also improving engagement among team members and participants.

However big or small your change process is, there are times when you need to get people in a room together. You might run a workshop with stakeholders to ideate upon and discuss change management initiatives. You might start by mapping out business processes and exploring issues in a structured session with your change advisory board.

A well-structured workshop process is a dynamic way of involving stakeholders and team members in the change process. Employee engagement is a vital part of creating meaningful change and SessionLab is the best tool for designing meetings and workshops where everyone’s voice is heard.

The intuitive drag-and-drop session planner makes designing your agenda a breeze. Create your workshop structure in minutes and easily iterate to design the perfect learning flow.

Identified a core training need and want to quickly design a training program for your organization? SessionLab makes it easy for learning designers to create a complex, multi-day training program that will help meet learner needs.

When you’re done, export in the best format for your team. Easily create beautiful training materials so your team can conduct training with confidence and iterate quickly.

SessionLab pricing

SessionLab has a free plan that lets you design up to 10 complete agendas. Paid plans that include real-time collaboration, unlimited sessions and more start at $15 per month. 

What kinds of change processes benefit from SessionLab?

Almost all change management processes have a moment where you need to bring people together for an engaging session. A well-structured workshop or meeting will help you and your team be productive and move things forward effectively.

Rolling out a leadership development program? SessionLab will help streamline your process and help you design effective training that will engage your learners. 

Running a stakeholder workshop on change requests but need to keep it under an hour long? SessionLab’s automatic time calculation will help you stay on time and focus on what matters most.

The Change Compass: Strategy-Driven Change Management

Best for enterprise companies with data-heavy change processes 

All companies benefit from efficient change management, but at enterprise level the impact of an exceptional or poor process only grow in magnitude. 

The Change Compass is specialized change management software that emphasizes strategy-driven change management, aligning change initiatives with organizational goals for maximum impact. If you’re looking for change management tools that can support large-scale change, dedicated tools can be incredibly beneficial.

Analytics, metrics and machine learning are at the heart of The Change Compass. They believe that data is integral to foreseeing, implementing and refining transformational change across the organizations that use their tool.

You’ll find a robust suite of dashboards and action planning tools that seek to join the dots between data and effective change implementation. The aim is to not only manage change better, but also better prioritorize different change initiatives and see their impact in one-place. 

The Change Compass pricing

The Change Compass starts at $695/Month.

What kinds of change processes benefit from The Change Compass?

The Change Compass is a tool that thrives in an enterprise environment where the data insights it provides help make informed decisions at scale. If you’re looking for change management software designed to service the needs of change managers in big companies, this is a great choice.

Change processes where you need to make sense of varied data sets and intelligently deploy changes that may have cross functional impacts especially benefit from using The Change Compass.

Viima: Collaborative Innovation Management

Best for change management processes focusing on innovation and ideation

Organizational change can come in many forms. While change can come about as a result of a change in the market or the discovery of a problem such as low employee motivation, many organizations deploy a change management model in pursuit of innovation.

Viima is a change management tool that is designed for organizations wanting to leverage the collective intelligence of a team and inspire a creative company culture. 

With their platform, Viima makes it easy to go through a structured process of sourcing, refining and selecting  innovative new ideas before analyzing their impact. They also include features to help streamline the workflow of change managers, automate key processes and make success repeatable throughout an organization.

Viima pricing

Viima has a free plan for teams wanting to get started, with 1 board for up to ten users. Paid plans start at ​​$39 per month. 

What kinds of change processes benefit from Viima?

Innovation is a goal for many organizations, though the path to achieving it isn’t always clear. If you’re running a process that seeks to engage people throughout an organization and simplify the process of sourcing and refining ideas, Viima is a great choice of change management software.

We love that it helps build a culture of continuous ideation and has a strong focus on facilitating creative processes. We especially recommend Viima for seasoned change managers and consultants who have a clear idea of how to guide their team towards the results they want to achieve and simply need a tool to help facilitate that process at scale. 

The Change Shop: A Comprehensive Change Management Hub

Best for small businesses 

The Change Shop provides a comprehensive change management hub with tools for project management, readiness assessment, training, collaboration and more. For change managers who need a suite of tools for each step of the process, The Change Shop platform is a great place to begin.

Effective change involves managing several moving parts. With The Change Shop, you’re able to manage change projects with robust project management tools, ensuring milestones are met and resources are optimized.

You’re also able to assess the readiness of individuals and teams for change, identifying areas for additional support and intervention by sending quick email based assessments. Alongside tools for simulating the impacts of change, comparing to similar businesses or to help you manage change requests, The Change Shop is a great way to support your process. 

The Change Shop pricing 

The Change Shop starts with a free plan that supports up to 3 change initiatives. For enterprise customers, plans start at $180 per month.

What kinds of change processes benefit from The Change Shop?

Change management can only be truly effective when each step of the process is fully realized. This means being sure to truly engage your team and stakeholders when gathering insights and using the right data to determine the impact of your initiatives.

Change processes that require team input and simple surveys will especially benefit from The Change Shop. If you’re looking for an easy to implement solution that works for small businesses as well as enterprise organizations, The Change Shop is well worth a look. 

Benchmark Gensuite: Comprehensive EHS and Sustainability Management

Best for Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) management 

Benchmark Gensuite is a versatile platform that specializes in Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) management, offering a comprehensive solution for organizations aiming to enhance their sustainability practices and comply with regulatory requirements. 

For organizations for whom identifying and mitigating risk in EHS matters and for whom change along these channels is likely, Benchmark Gensuite is a powerful change management tool. 

Benchmark Gensuite has powerful features for track and measure sustainability initiatives, ensuring alignment with corporate goals and regulatory standards. You can effectively manage incidents and improve business processes with tools for reporting, investigation, and implementing corrective actions.

Benchmark Gensuite pricing

Custom quote.

What kinds of change processes benefit from Benchmark Gensuite

Benchmark Gensuite is an especially effective tool for organizations in sectors that may involve greater levels of EHS risk.

For example, you may run a risk assessment, centralize your tracking of safety incidents and then use the data to inform the rollout of new regulations. After the implementation of such a change, you can ensure employee compliance and measure the impact, all in one-place.

Change processes that involve identifying and removing risk to personnel while then standardizing processes and actions would be those most likely to benefit from change management software like Benchmark Gensuite.

ServiceNow: Change and Release Management Application

Best for IT change management 

ServiceNow‘s Change and Release Management Application is a part of the broader ServiceNow platform, offering a comprehensive solution for managing changes and releases in an IT environment.

ServiceNow helps streamline the change request process, from submission to approval, ensuring all changes are well-documented and assessed. One of its main selling points is increasing the velocity and stability of change, backed up with data insights and a change success score that helps change managers make informed decisions. 

You can plan and coordinate releases with visibility into dependencies and potential impacts on the IT environment. You’re also able to create custom approval policies and custom changes for different use cases. For a dev team handling many requests and whom need to undergo a change management approval process, the saving in time and overhead can be massive.

Change management systems are always most effective when they are designed to support the specific changes being enacted. ServiceNow is a great example of a bespoke tool that can support the great needs of your team members too.

ServiceNow pricing

Custom quote.

What kinds of change processes benefit from ServiceNow?

As a specialised change management tool, ServiceNow is especially effective for IT departments and dev teams making changes to their IT infrastructure and the digital workflows that power their organization.

Technological changes and regular platform or service updates to address user needs and issues are two common change processes you’d roll out using ServiceNow. Key features like asset management, change-logs and dev tooling make it a great choice for managing continuous change in an IT environment.

Whatfix: Digital Adoption and Employee Training Platform

Best for helping teams adopt new tools 

Employee training or the implementation of new technologies are two common strategies for achieving change. Even when the need is great, it can be a challenge to ensure a team is able to adopt the change and start seeing results. In cases like this, change managers often turn to change management tools that can help their teams adopt and learn new tools at speed.

Whatfix is a powerful digital adoption platform that seeks to make employee onboarding and training more effective. When rolling out new tools, change managers might develop interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and in-app guidance to help employees quickly adapt and speed up the change adoption process. 

Whatfix integrates well with a variety of enterprise applications, learning management systems (LMS), and collaboration tools, which makes it a great choice of change management tool for organizations who simply need an extra layer within their existing toolset.

Whatfix pricing

Custom quote.

What kinds of change processes benefit from Whatfix?

For change managers involved in implementing technological changes, Whatfix is a great choice of change management tool. Being able to directly impact the speed of adoption for technological changes and new tools can have a massive impact on everything from employee happiness to your bottom line.

As a digital adoption platform, Whatfix solves very specific problems and may not be the first choice for every change manager. Consider the greatest friction points might be when it comes to helping your team adapt to change and select your change management tools accordingly.

360Learning: Collaborative Learning and Training Platform

Best for hosting training and development programs 

For learning and development teams, the choice of how and where to host training materials can be an integral part of how you create successful change. First you need to find a platform that makes it easy to create courses and learning opportunities for your team.

Ideally, your choice of solution will also include advanced analytics and tracking features that will allow you to proactively identify learner needs, iterate and refine your learning programs.  

360Learning is an advanced learning management system for developing internal courses and development programs. You’re able to host interactive and engaging learning content, measure effectiveness and iterate easily.

It also has a host of key features for tracking progress ensuring you meet any regulatory standards and training mandates that might come out of change requests.

360Learning pricing 

Pricing for 360Learning starts at $8 per registered user per month.

What kinds of change processes benefit from 360learning?

Decided that the greatest potential change for your organization is a new employee training program? Your courses and learning content need to live somewhere!

360Learning is a great choice of change management tool for teams who need to create and host effective training programs while continually improving their offering.

As with many of the change management tools on this list, 360Learning is a great solution for enacting a specific kind of change and optimizing the process. If training and employee engagement is at the heart of your desired organizational change, a tool like this should be a part of your stack.

Miro: Digital whiteboard and Collaboration Platform

Best for virtual collaboration

For many change managers and facilitators, the change process is one that benefits from space to think visually and collaboratively brainstorm. Common change management tasks like systems mapping and running participatory workshops can especially benefit from using a digital whiteboard like Miro to support the process. 

Miro is a versatile collaboration platform that can be used as part of a change management process by facilitating brainstorming, planning, and collaboration in a virtual environment. It’s a great tool to support change managers when leading workshops, engaging stakeholders and ideating around what can be an incredibly complex process. 

In our experience, any change process benefits from effective collaboration. We use SessionLab to design the agenda for key sessions and then bring Miro to the virtual workshop to collect insights, visualize the systems being affected and collaboratively come up with ideas and proposals.

Miro pricing

Miro has a free plan to help teams get started with visual collaboration. Paid plans start at $8 per user, per month.

What kinds of change processes benefit from Miro?

Some change management tools are spaces that will help you do your best work. Miro is a great tool for engaging participants in a virtual session and as such, any change process where you are running virtual workshops can benefit from tools like Miro.

As a digital whiteboard, Miro is highly flexible and whether you’re running workshops as part of your change management process or simply want a place to visually collaborate, it can be a great addition to your toolkit. 

Notion: Collaborative Workspace for Information Management

Best for knowledge management and documentation

For some change managers, the tool is less important than the process or framework being used. Instead of requiring dedicated change management software, they simply need a place to record changes, feature updated documentation and conduct light project management.

For our team at SessionLab, Notion is a natural place to record, track and update any change processes alongside our existing documentation. 

Notion is massively customizable and enables co-creation and knowledge sharing across an entire organization. Notion integrates well with other tools and with its powerful database features, we’ve found it a great way to track progress, conduct asset management and manage our work.

While it’s not a bespoke change management tool, Notion (or whatever other central work hub you’re using) has everything change managers need to start collecting knowledge and project manage change. In a tech stack alongside Miro and SessionLab, you can very quickly support your change management framework and be more efficient in the work you are doing.

Notion pricing 

Notion has a free version for single users. Paid plans start at $10 per user, per month. 

What kinds of change processes benefit from Notion?

As SessionLab, Notion is where all our company documentation and high level reporting lives. It’s a single source of truth that anyone in the company can refer to and easily find what they need.

Change processes whose output includes small, ongoing changes to company policies or tracking of OKRs and KPIs can definitely find a home in Notion. Especially if your teams are already using it, the flexibility Notion offers make it a good choice of generalist change management tool.

Stracl: Organizational Change Management Solution

Best for enterprise companies looking for a single change management solution

A relative newcomer to the space, Stracl is a change management tool that was initially developed for a change management training and consulting company called jTask. The knowledge and experience gained from helping clients implement change is clearly evident when looking at Stracl. 

Stracl hosts a ton of features designed to help Enterprise level organizations with the core tasks of change management process. It’s easy to conduct stakeholder analysis, develop communication plans and map user capabilities. Stracl shines as a tool to support the everyday work of change managers.

Stracl pricing:

Stracl’s enterprise pricing starts at $1499 per month. 

What kinds of change processes benefit from Stracl?

Many of the other change management tools on this list serve many purposes. Stracl sets itself apart as a bespoke tool that allows you to conduct and manage core change management tasks in one place.

Employee training and wellness programs are well suited for Stracl’s feature set, and so change processes that are focusing on human change or personal development are a great fit.

For change teams not already invested in other tools, Stracl is a great choice, with many of they key features you’d expect under one roof. With their history of involvement in a change management consultancy, you can feel assured that these folks understand your needs and pain points. 

Wrike: Project Management with Change Integration

Best for project management 

Wrike is a versatile project management platform with features for change management, providing a unified solution for teams to project manage their tasks, some of which may include change initiatives.

In Wrike, you’re able to manage projects and collaborate in real-time with features like task management, Gantt charts, and collaborative spaces. You can easily utilize reporting and analytics tools to gain insights into project and change performance and support your process.

As with many other project management tools, Wrike also integrates with popular productivity tools and if you’re already familiar with it, it can serve as a great central hub for your work.

Maintaining visibility of change initiatives across the organization and making it a part of your team’s workflow can really help ensure change is enacted successfully.

Wrike can be where you track and manage the overall change management process, but you’ll also lean on other tools when running assessments, designing workshops or helping your team implement new tech.

Wrike pricing

Wrike has a free plan for teams getting started, then has paid plans starting at $9.80 per month.

What kinds of change processes benefit from Wrike?

Like Notion and other change management tools that perform many functions, Wrike can be an effective choice of tool for teams already invested in the ecosystem or who may want their change processes to be visible across the organization.

For change managers whose main work is framework or workshop based and just need somewhere to log progress and project manage their initiatives, Wrike might just be your best bet. 

Leapsome: Performance Management Platform

Best for HR teams and employee performance management

Improving team performance and organizational culture is a common area where change managers are asked to intervene. Leapsome is a great change management tool for any team implementing personnel focused change or for HR departments seeking to identify opportunities, risks and manage employee engagement over time.

Leapsome offers a comprehensive performance management system, including goal setting, continuous feedback, and performance reviews to drive employee growth and development.

Change managers can send surveys, deploy 360-degree feedback and see performance of every employee over time. It’s easy to create personalized development plans and learning opportunities in line with your proposed changes and track the impact over time. 

With people analytics as the heart of its offering, Leapsome is also great for gaining insights at speed and using it to inform change management processes across the organization. 

Leapsome pricing

Custom quote. 

What kinds of change processes benefit from Leapsome?

Performance management tools like Leapsome are often at the core of measuring the impact of people-centric change such as introducing employee wellness or training programs. They can also be useful for any organization wanting to keep an eye on how their team feels about organizational culture and spot potential risks and opportunities ahead of time.

HR teams will love Leapsome, and the insights you gain from such a tool are useful for all processes that will have an effect on team happiness and performance.

What are the benefits of using a change management tool?

Managing a change process is no simple task. Whether you’re following a change management framework such as PROSCI or ADKAR or taking a more direct approach, there are many steps involved in identifying, implementing and evaluating the changes you have made.

As discussed above, change management software broadly falls into three camps:

1. tools to help manage the change process
2. tools for optimizing key tasks
3. tools that will help you implement your chosen changes.

At each stage of the process, change management tools can be a fundamental part of achieving successful change. Here’s how:

Improved Communication

Change management tools provide a centralized platform for communication, ensuring that information is distributed consistently and reaches all relevant stakeholders. This can be essential when creating communication plans, notifying stakeholders and managing the complexity of a change process.

Your change management software can also help reduce communication overhead. It’s quite common to directly lower the number of meetings and emails exchanged by creating a transparent process with visibility of key items.

Enhanced Collaboration

Many change management tools include collaborative workspaces, allowing teams to work together, share ideas, and collaborate on documents in real time. This is especially valuable when facilitating collaboration across different departments and teams, breaking down silos and promoting a holistic approach to change.

Efficient Project Management

Change management tools often include features for tracking tasks, milestones, and overall project progress, ensuring that initiatives stay on schedule.

With so many moving parts in a typical process, your choice of change management system can be invaluable in simply making sense of how things need to progress and helping to optimize productivity.

Increased Accountability

Team support and buy-in can be one of the most important levers of successful change. Assigning responsibilities and ownership for specific tasks or aspects of the change process can help the process be more transparent, reducing ambiguity and enhancing accountability.

In most tools, project management features will help stakeholders keep track of milestones, allowing for proactive intervention if there are delays or roadblocks.

Risk Reduction

Change management tools often include features for identifying and assessing potential risks associated with the change, enabling organizations to develop mitigation strategies. They can often include features to detect issues or resistance early, allowing change managers proactively address concerns.

Reporting tools can also be invaluable in helping teams see potential risks before they become an issue and create a culture of continous improvement, rather than needing to firefight problems once they’ve escalated.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Many tools provide robust analytics and reporting features that can help reduce noise and bias in any change process. This can include tools that analyize feedback and survey data early in the process. Data is also massively important when it comes to determining the effectiveness of the change management process and make data-driven decisions for what to do next.

Employee Engagement

The best change management tools often include features for conducting engagement surveys, helping organizations gauge employee sentiment and adjust strategies accordingly. While there are many options for gathering such feedback, being able to collect, manage and analyze feedback in one place can help change managers save a lot of time in the process.

Should your chosen change require the rollout of new or improved training, a dedicated learning tool can be invaluable. Learning management systems and other training tools help support the delivery of interactive and personalized training materials, enhancing employee understanding and participation in the change process.

Documentation and Knowledge Management

Creating a centralized repository for change-related documents helps ensure that everyone has access to the latest information and resources. Being able to effectively manage and update key policies and create a single-source of truth for your team is invaluable for many change managers.

Depending on your needs, this might involve creating a space in your existing company documentation or bringing an entirely new tool to your tech stack.

Flexibility and Adaptability

Change management tools with flexible workflows accommodate adjustments to the change plan as needed, allowing organizations to adapt to evolving circumstances. Creating change is rarely a straightforward process and using bespoke tools designed to facilitate change can help your adapt and stay productive, whatever happens.

Such tools are also highly effective athelping manage change at scales, simplifying or optimizing the ability to make improvements to large-scale organizational transformations.

Improved producitivity and efficiency

At each step of the change process, change managers need to conduct various tasks in order to make change happen. Whether its conducting risk assessments, holding brainstorming sessions or evaluating feedback, using a tool can help ensure that each step is efficient and productive.

By saving time on busy work and streamlining their workflow, change managers can focus on the most important parts of the process.

Post-Implementation Evaluation

Whatever change you implement, you’ll need to measure the impact and course correct if necessary. The best change management tools allow organizations to conduct surveys post-implementation and analyze the effectiveness of the change and identify areas for continuous improvement.

These tools also enable tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the change, helping organizations measure the success of the initiative in a data-informed manner.

Conclusion

Navigating organizational change is a challenge.

Change management tools contribute significantly to the success of organizational changes by providing structure, transparency, and efficiency throughout the change process. They help organizations navigate complexities, mitigate risks, and engage stakeholders effectively, ultimately facilitating a smoother and more successful transformation.

Whether you’re looking for a bespoke tool to add to your change management toolkit or need a complete solution, we hope this list of the best change management tools has been helpful!

Have any suggestions that weren’t on this list? Let us know below. We’re always on the lookout for suggestions that have helped change managers enact meaningful change, create innovation and solve tough problems!

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the 14 best virtual meeting tools for 2024, each offering unique features to enhance your online interactions and run more productive online meetings.

In a remotely distributed, always-online world, virtual meetings are the norm. On a typical week, more than 50% of employees spend between one and three hours in virtual meetings. That’s a lot of time spent looking at cameras and screens! 

An effective online meeting can help teams get aligned, plan tasks and feel connected in less than an hour. The right tools help facilitate this process and help improve productivity too.

In this guide, we’ll share some of our favourite online meeting tools that we use across our teams at SessionLab. Here, you won’t find a recommendation that we haven’t used ourselves! 

Looking for free online meeting tools? All but one of these tools has a free option! We’ll share some insight about price and how we’ve used each app so you can easily decide what to bring to your next virtual meeting without needing to worry about pricing.

SessionLab: Your Meeting Design Ally

Best meeting design tool

Key Features:

• Fast, effective agenda design.
• Drag & Drop agenda builder.
• Automatic timing calculation.
• Real-time collaboration.
• Beautiful printouts.
• Templates and reusable agendas.

SessionLab is more than just a virtual meeting tool; it’s your secret weapon for designing, facilitating, and documenting effective meetings and workshops. Whether you’re a professional facilitator, a trainer, or a team leader, SessionLab empowers you to plan and run engaging virtual sessions with ease.

Simple, effective agenda design: SessionLab provides a comprehensive platform for designing workshops, meetings, and training sessions. The intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes designing your agenda a breeze. Add blocks to easily create your meeting structure and build from there.

Stay in control of time: Add clear timing to every activity and create a minute-perfect agenda. Use Time Tracker to help you stay on time while running the meeting. When you need to make changes, your timing will update automatically. Save time on manual adjustments so you can focus on running an effective session. 

Session Templates and Reusable agendas: SessionLab simplifies the meeting planning process with pre-designed templates and reusable agendas. Ensure that your meetings and workshops follow a structured format across your entire organization. Save time by reusing and adapting your recurring meeting agenda. 

Does it have a free version? Yes. You can design up to 10 meeting agendas in SessionLab for free!

Zoom: The Video Conferencing Giant

Best video conferencing tool

Key Features:

• High-quality video and audio.
• Screen sharing and annotation.
• Breakout rooms for group discussions.
• Robust mobile app.
• Integration with third-party apps.

Zoom almost needs no introduction. Renowned for its reliability, ease of use, and comprehensive feature set, Zoom is a top choice for video conferencing, webinars, and more.

Whether it’s for internal meetings or running events in our community, we’ve found that Zoom offers a solid, reliable platform for video calls. It’s easy to do screen sharing with participants, set-up breakout rooms for group work and control the flow of the meeting. It’s also a good choice when we want to record sessions or invite external collaborators to meet. 

Zoom’s integrations are also a massive boon when it comes to collaboration. We often pair Zoom with an online whiteboard such as Miro or Mural and have our SessionLab agenda on the second screen to keep everything running smoothly.   

At this stage in the game, Zoom is a great choice of online meeting tool because everyone is so familiar with it. Your meeting attendees are likely to know how to navigate between chat channels, jump into breakouts and send emoji reactions. This means they can focus on the content of the meeting, rather than fumbling with controls.  

Does it have a free version? On Zoom’s free plan, you can run an online meeting with up to 100 attendees for up to 40 minutes.

Miro: Unleash Creativity in Virtual Sessions

Best online whiteboard tool

Key Features:

• Online whiteboard and collaboration platform.
• Visual thinking tools for brainstorming.
• Pre-built templates for workshops.
• Integration with popular apps.
• Real-time collaboration.

Miro is a powerful digital whiteboard for encouraging creativity and collaboration in virtual workshops and meetings. It’s a versatile tool for visual thinking and ideation and we use it in many of our more involved workshops and meetings. 

Collaborating in real-time on a shared digital canvas with notes, ideas and other resources is a great way of making a virtual meeting more interactive. We often use Miro’s voting features to help us sort and prioritorize ideas during many of our sessions. The extra features available to the meeting host are really helpful when it comes to facilitating more complex sessions.

Miro is also great to use before and after a meeting. We’ll often add ideas or topics to a Miro board ahead of a meeting and use it as a continuing workspace for remote team members afterwards. 

Visual thinkers will be immediately at home in Miro. It includes many visual tools including sticky notes, flowcharts, and mind maps, to facilitate brainstorming and idea generation. We love being able to add images and GIFs to a board too! 

Does it have a free version? Miro’s free plan is enough to get started, with a single workspace and 3 editable boards.

Calendly: Simplified Scheduling for Online Meetings

Best meeting scheduling tool 

Key Features:

• Automated scheduling and appointment booking.
• Personalized meeting availability.
• Integration with calendar apps.
• Customizable meeting types and durations.
• Meeting reminders and notifications.

Calendly is an efficient scheduling and appointment booking tool that streamlines the process of arranging meetings, consultations, and appointments. It simplifies scheduling by allowing users to share their availability and book appointments effortlessly.

With Calendly, you can automate the scheduling process, eliminating the back-and-forth emails to find suitable meeting times. Share your Calendly link, and participants can book appointments based on your availability.

At SessionLab, we use Calendly extensively when arranging external virtual meetings, whether that be user interviews or partner meetings. It’s simple, easy to set-up and takes a lot of hassle out of arranging meetings. The integration with Google Calendar is a particular benefit here!

Calendly also sends automated reminders and notifications to participants, reducing the likelihood of no-shows and ensuring that everyone is prepared for the meeting.

Does it have a free version? Calendly’s free plan you to have unlimited meetings of a single event type, and we’ve found it plenty to get started with!

SpatialChat: a Space for Virtual Networking

Best tool for virtual offices

Key Features:

• 3D spatial audio for natural conversations.
• Virtual spaces for events and meetings.
• Networking features for social interaction.
• Customizable virtual environments.
• Integration with calendar apps.

SpatialChat brings a fresh approach to online meetings by creating immersive, 3D audio-based virtual spaces for events and meetings. If you’re looking to create a shared office feel or create a space where spontaneous conversation can occur, SpatialChat is a great option in a crowded video conferencing market.

In SpatialChat, you and your team can create virtual spaces for events, conferences, or team meetings, complete with customizable environments and layouts. Coupled with proximity-based chat, it can create a space where participants can network and socialize naturally. At SessionLab, our product team uses their space to engage in spontaneous conversations during the workday and have made it their own! 

Does it have a free version? SpatialChat offers video conferencing for up to 5 users for 2 hours a day on its free plan.

Otter.ai: Transform Virtual Meetings into Searchable Content

Best tool for meeting transcription

Key Features:

• Automatic transcription of meetings.
• Searchable and shareable meeting notes.
• Integrations with popular conferencing tools.
• AI-powered summarization.
• Real-time transcription.

Otter.ai is an intelligent assistant for turning spoken words into searchable, shareable, and actionable meeting notes. It’s been very useful for creating meeting transcripts, particularly during customer interviews or discussions. 

Otter.ai transcribes your meetings in real-time, capturing every spoken word with  accuracy. The transcriptions are searchable, making it easy to find specific discussions or topics. You can also share these notes with team members for reference.

While not every virtual meeting calls for Otter.ai, I’ve found it can be a great way to speed up the process of transcription and summarization. 

Does it have a free version? With 300 monthly transcription minutes at 30 minutes per conversation, Otter.ai’s free plan is well positioned to start supporting your online meetings.

TeamRetro: Elevate Your Retrospectives

Best tool for running team retrospectives

Key Features:

• Agile retrospective and feedback platform.
• Pre-built retrospective templates.
• Collaboration and voting features.
• Action item tracking.
• Integration with project management tools.

TeamRetro is a dedicated platform for agile retrospectives and feedback gathering. It streamlines the retrospective process and empowers teams to continuously improve their work. When we’re running retrospective meetings, we often kick-off asynchronously by asking team members to add input to TeamRetro before presenting and discussing items during the session. 

While you could run an agile retrospective without it (or recreate the process in your online whiteboard) we’ve found it much more effective to use a dedicated tool. Not only does it save time, but it ensures the process is followed across our various teams. 

Team members can collaborate by adding feedback and voting on important issues, ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard. After the virtual meeting is done, we can also easily track, assign and manage action items. While you won’t bring TeamRetro to all of your virtual meetings, for retrospectives, you’ll be glad you did! 

Does it have a free version? TeamRetro does not currently have a free plan.

Google Meet: Video Conferencing with Google’s Power

Best tool for simple meetings

Key Features:

• Integration with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
• Secure and reliable video meetings.
• Screen sharing and collaborative features.
• Calendar integration for scheduling.
• Encrypted video meetings.

Google Meet, integrated with Google Workspace, offers a seamless video conferencing experience. If you’re already invested in Google’s suite of productivity tools, this is a natural choice. 

At SessionLab, we use Google Meet for arranging simple internal meetings. The ease of organizing a video call (and reorganizing!) with Calendar and jumping in for a chat make this a great tool for our regular virtual meetings. It’s one of our favourite free online meeting tools, with so much value being offered without needing to go anywhere near the business plan.

Google Meet features all the bells and whistles you’d expect from modern video conferencing software. With simple integrations, screen sharing, secure and reliable video meetings and more. 

The choice between this and other meeting tools often comes down to your existing ecosystem (Google or Microsoft) and whether your virtual meetings tend to be internal or external. In our case, it makes sense to primarily use Google Meet for simple meetings and Zoom for external sessions and those where we’ll be recording. If you need a simple tool for video calling, be sure to give Google Meet a go – especially with it’s native Google Calendar integration!

You can also integrate your Google Drive with SessionLab, making it easy to add your files and resources to your SessionLab agenda. 

Does it have a free version? As a standalone meeting tool, Google Meet offers video calling without limitations. When using Google Workspace on a business plan, pricing starts at $5 per user, per month.

Mentimeter: Engage Your Audience with Interactive Presentations

Best tool for meeting engagement

Key Features:

• Interactive presentation and polling tool.
• Live audience engagement.
• Real-time feedback and surveys.
• Versatile question types.
• Integration with presentation software.

Mentimeter is a go-to tool for creating engaging and interactive presentations that captivate your audience and gather real-time feedback. It was the most cited engagement tool in the State of Facilitation 2023 report and with good reason. 

Mentimeter transforms traditional presentations into interactive experiences by adding polls, quizzes, and audience engagement activities. If you’ve found your team all hands a little lacking or want to easily gather insights from your whole team during an online meeting, a tool like Mentimeter is a great way to engage your audience. It plays well with video conferencing tools and features a mobile app too!

If you’re looking for a surefire way to improve the quality of your team meetings and get your meeting participants engaged, try adding interactive elements via Mentimeter. You’ll be surprised at how much more dynamic it can make proceedings! 

Does it have a free version? Mentimeter’s free plan offers 50 participants per month.

Microsoft Teams: Collaboration in the Microsoft Ecosystem

Best tool for integrated meetings 

Key Features:

• Integration with Microsoft 365.
• Team chat and collaboration.
• Video conferencing and screen sharing.
• File sharing and storage.

Microsoft Teams is a comprehensive collaboration platform that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps and services, making it an ideal choice of online meeting tool for organizations deeply entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Whether it’s collaborating on documents within the platform or hosting video meetings and screen sharing sessions directly within Teams, everything you’d expect is here. While some of the other video conferencing software on the list is great when standing alone, Teams really comes into its own when you leverage it’s integrations and complete workspace.

Choosing between Teams and other options likely comes down to preference and what your organization is already using though when running external meetings, stay open to alternatives that might best serve your audience. 

SessionLab integrates with Microsoft Teams too, so you can easily access your files and resources and link to them in your SessionLab agenda. 

Does it have a free version? As with many desktop and mobile platforms, Microsoft Teams has a basic free plan you can use to get used to the software, but it really comes into its own once you start on even the first business plan.

Google Docs: Collaborative Document Editing

Best tool for simple collaboration and note taking

Key Features:

• Real-time collaborative document editing.
• Commenting and feedback features.
• Version history and revision tracking.
• Integration with Google Drive.
• Accessible from any device.

Google Docs is a staple for collaborative document editing. While not a traditional virtual meeting tool, it’s indispensable for simple note taking, collaboration and sharing documents in real-time. 

Multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously, facilitating real-time collaboration and feedback. While you might want to use an online whiteboard for deeper visual collaboration, the simplicity of a word processor like Google Docs can ensure everyone in your meeting is able to get involved. These kinds of free online meeting tools are an indispensable part of your toolkit as a facilitator!

Google Docs automatically tracks changes and comments, allowing you to review previous versions and see who made specific edits. It’s also easy to share different access rights, meaning you can let people view a file without editing during a meeting if you wish! If you’re looking for a quick way to add simple note taking or text collaboration to your video conferencing offering, Docs is likely your best shout.

Does it offer a free version? As with the rest of Google’s suite of tools, Google Docs has an option for free Google users that only gets more powerful when integrated in a business plan.

Notion: A Comprehensive Workspace for Collaboration

Best tool for project management and meeting notes

Key Features:

• Workspace for notes, documents, and databases.
• Real-time collaboration on content.
• Kanban boards and project management tools.
• Integration with popular apps.
• Customizable workspaces.

Notion is more than just a note-taking app; it’s a comprehensive workspace for teams to collaborate, plan, and manage projects in real-time. As a online meeting tool to support our sessions and remote workflows, Notion has been wonderful for us at SessionLab. We use it as the hub for all our company documents, and so it naturally follows to keep our meeting notes there too! 

Notion combines notes, documents, and databases into a unified workspace, making it easy to organize and collaborate on content. Link items well and it’s easy to turn discussion points from your meeting into a task or a project. 

You can even add them to a database, kanban board or other project management tool to help your team plan and track their work. Notion’s power really comes into play when centralizing your documentation and enriching it with the output of your meetings. We attach our SessionLab agenda to our meeting notes so everything is well organized too! 

Does it have a free version? Notion offers unlimited content for individuals though when collaborating with your team, you’ll likely want to graduate to the basic paid plan.

Slack: Streamlined Communication and Collaboration

Best tool for messaging 

Key Features:

• Team messaging and chat.
• Channels for organized discussions.
• Integration with various apps and services.
• Voice and video calls.
• File sharing and collaboration.

Slack is renowned for its team messaging and collaboration capabilities, making it a valuable addition to any toolkit for virtual meetings and communication. While we don’t use Slack during the running of the actual virtual meeting, it’s where almost all of our inter-team communication happens. Facilitating communication before and after the meeting is often as important as the meeting itself, so be sure to consider a tool for this. 

Slack provides a centralized hub for team communication through channels, direct messaging, and group conversations. You can create channels for specific teams, projects, or topics, ensuring organized and focused discussions. You can also integrate channels with external tools and services, getting updates when you get a new survey response or support ticket, for example.

Slack also supports voice and video calls, allowing you to transition from text-based discussions to face-to-face meetings whenever needed. We’ve found it to be less robust than other options such as Google Meet or Zoom, but as a communication tool for day to day work is where it really shines.   

Does it have a free version? Slack’s free plan includes up to 90 days of history and support for team conversations. It’s more than enough to get started and supporting your online meetings and team collaborations!

PowerPoint: Hold Participants’ Attention with Visual Presentations

Best tool for virtual presentations

Key Features:

• Create and design presentations.
• Slides with text, images, and multimedia.
• Animation and transition effects.
• Presenter mode for virtual presentations.
• Integration with collaboration tools.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a versatile presentation software that empowers users to create visually engaging and informative presentations for virtual meetings, webinars, and conferences. 

While it might not be your immediate thought for a virtual meeting tool, PowerPoint plays a crucial role in delivering compelling content during online interactions. It was one of the most mentioned tools that facilitators use in the State of Facilitation 2023. Facilitators also use PowerPoint Online as a space to collaborate in real-time, inviting participants to join them in the tool during a virtual meeting. 

Depending on the ecosystem you’re in, you might prefer Google Slides or even Canva for your visual presentations, though in our experience, PowerPoint offers a powerful toolset that you can use for a variety of purposes. 

Does it have a free version? PowerPoint Online has a version that is available for free online, though for teams and more robust needs, you may need to purchase the software or grab a subscription to Office365.

Conclusion

In the digital age, online meetings have become the cornerstone of collaboration and communication. Whether you’re looking to design engaging workshops, conduct video conferences, gather real-time feedback, or streamline collaboration, the right virtual meeting tools can transform your interactions and enhance your productivity.

From SessionLab’s specialized meeting design capabilities to the robust video conferencing of Zoom and the immersive collaboration of Miro, these tools cater to a wide range of needs and preferences. Consider the needs of your virtual meeting and use those tools that support your goals and the format of your sessions.

Explore these options, experiment, and discover the perfect virtual meeting toolset that works for you and your team. Remember that we’ve focused on (mostly) free online meeting tools, so you can get started without worrying about pricing.

With the right tools at your disposal, you’ll unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and collaboration in your virtual meetings. Want to go further? Read about how to run more effective team meetings in our guide or explore how you might develop and use facilitation skills to augment your online meeting tools!

When designing activities and workshops, you’ll probably start by using templates and methods you are familiar with. Soon enough, you’ll need to expand your range and look for facilitation methods and tips for various situations, groups, and timeframes. So, where can you find them?

If you are looking for individual methods, for example an activity to start your session with, here is a list of the best online method libraries and collections of workshop activities. These are important resources, and good to bookmark, but it is also true that facilitation goes well beyond the ability to pick and lead a good game, energizer, or brainstorming activity.

A skilled facilitator knows how to put it all together in a coherent flow, design workshops that deliver results, and encourage people to bring their best possible contribution to group work by applying facilitation skills such as active listening.

If you want to develop a deeper understanding of how facilitation works and pick up some good methods along the way, luckily many organizations and groups around the world have taken the time to put together complete facilitation toolkits. In this article, we will provide links and details to 10 of the best toolkits to learn, and improve, your facilitation skills.

Continuous development is very important to facilitators. Keeping up to date with the latest trends is important in order to keep attracting clients and for your workshops to stay relevant. While the main principles of facilitation remain stable in time, new ideas and frameworks emerge all of the time.

Stay on top of the game, keep connected and inspired by getting into the habit of listening to facilitation podcasts and subscribing to popular newsletters.

In this article, we will cover different types of facilitation resources that can help you in your journey to becoming a skilled professional in this growing field.

Stay on Top of the Game with Facilitation Newsletters

You may find it hard to keep up to date with the latest trends and topics that are attracting interest within the world of facilitation and workshop design.

Luckily though, there are a handful of generous businesses, organizations individual consultants, and thought leaders in the field who neatly package information on what is current in newsletters delivered straight to your inbox.

Here are 4 facilitation newsletters we recommend. These are the ones we actually open, read, and discuss, but for sure there are many others: let us know in the comments what your favorite ones are!

Gwyn Wansbrough’s The Quest.

Delivered every Monday to most facilitators I know, Gwyn Wansbrough’s The Quest newsletter is a charming combination of personal insights and curated information.

Each edition begins with a question and offers pathways for readers to deepen their knowledge of a specific topic. Gwyn specializes in online workshops and you will find a lot of useful tips on making remote sessions engaging, but there are topics specific to in-person facilitation as well, and many subjects apply to both settings.

You can browse through all previous editions right here.

Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering

With her book The Art of Gathering – How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker did away with all the jargon and wove heartfelt, thoughtful connections between being a facilitator and being a host.

In her widely read newsletter, she keeps the connections flowing. The Art of Gathering is a reliable source of inspiration not only for business development and effective meetings, but for creating magic every time people assemble, be it a family meal or a formal reception.

Voltage Control’s Control the Room

Every week, Voltage Control‘s Douglas Ferguson packs a snappy, condensed write-up of whatever the industry has been discussing these days. Be it the return to the office, psychological safety, or the latest trends in design and innovation. The newsletter also lists upcoming events, courses, and a summary of the latest podcast episode.

Control the Room is great for staying current on what makes meetings great and for actionable ideas for planning innovation processes. It was also the most-listened-to facilitation podcast of 2022, based on answers given to the State of Facilitation survey.

SessionLab’s Newsletter

At SessionLab we put out a newsletter twice a month, bringing a curated selection of methods from our Library as well as featured templates, events, and links to more resources to feed your curiosity.

We’ve also prepared a bounty of extra material you can get delivered straight to your inbox, including two email courses and two facilitation manuals: SessionLab’s Complete Guide to Workshop Planning and the Essential Meeting Facilitation Toolkit.

The first email course, “Facilitation is for Everyone!” is a 5-week introduction to what facilitation is, covering the basics of group dynamics and tips on how to make your meetings better. It includes activities and worksheets to get you started.

If you facilitate already and would like to dig deeper, “Solving Facilitation Challenges” might be just the thing. It covers 4 key obstacles, and introduces pathways to becoming more resourceful facilitators: keeping up with the trends; collaborating with your team; transforming conflict; and managing time.

Listen to the Best Facilitation Podcasts

Do the job you love, they say, and you will never work a day be working all the time. If listening to facilitators talk shop, or getting inspired by the stories of creative innovators, is your idea of rest, you are in good company.

There is a growing number of podcasts dedicated to facilitation, effective meetings, group processes, and workshop design. Do you have some to recommend? Please add them in the comments!

First Time Facilitator

Leanne Hughes’ long-running First Time Facilitator podcast is a great place to begin with. In any one of its over 200 episodes, you’ll find inspiration and encouragement that are consistently beginner-friendly.

The podcast has a focus on training and learning, bringing a no-nonsense, can-do attitude to creating learning experiences that really work. The First Time Facilitator podcast is a reliable provider of sound advice and immediately applicable recommendations and tips.

Workshops Work

Myriam Hadnes has collected so many in-depth interviews in her essential podcast Workshops Work that she had to have a special map designed just to help listeners orient and choose!

Workshop Work has, rightly so, gained a faithful following among facilitators worldwide, with its deep, insightful interviews with experts of meeting design as well as with professionals drawing in their expertise from other fields, such as mediation, marketing, and the arts. You can also download scripts and one-page summaries of each conversation.

Creative Confidence

Listeners of IDEO U’s Creative Confidence podcast get to listen in on the creative process of innovators, designers and strategists from a variety of industries.

In each episode, IDEO U Founder Suzanne Gibbs Howard and Executive Design Director Coe Leta Stafford lead conversations that aim to identify each guest’s unique way of leading, being creative, innovating, and growing, and what lessons we can all learn from their stories.

Happiness Academy

The way we enter a room as facilitators does matter. Many experienced facilitators will highlight the importance of inner work and the type of posture and presence you bring into a room as you lead participants in a workshop. If you’d like to know more about this topic, Mirna Smidt’s Happiness Academy podcast may be just the thing.

In each episode, Mirna discusses an aspect of positive psychology, such as how to bring more focus, presence, and concentration to your work. This podcast is not targeted at facilitators especially, but as a trainer of trainers herself, Mirna has examples and applications that can be nuggets of gold for workshop professionals and trainers.

How Toolkits can Help you Learn Facilitation

Facilitation toolkits contain a set of facilitation methods, activities, and techniques in one, downloadable format. This comes in really handy when you need to access them offline. Additionally, the best toolkits are designed to accent their content and provide structure and categorization for better understanding and usage of the activities.

Need more reasons why they are a great resource?

The toolkits you will find in this post will help a skilled facilitator as well as a newcomer to the field. They all have an easily understandable format, regarding both the method descriptions and the whole documents, too and they are all free and downloadable, so you can use them whenever you want.

These toolkits contain several different techniques for various facilitation needs, so you won’t spend time needlessly searching methods one-by-one for each of your projects or meetings. Even better,  this list of toolkits we have collected can help you facilitate a whole session, all the way from opening to closing.

So without further ado, here are the toolkits!

Curated Collections of Facilitation Methods

In this opening section we’ve collected lists of activities and methods. Facilitators, generally speaking, will have a series of tools and practices they are familiar with, know to work well, and can always fall back upon. That said, it’s always nice to learn new practices, be it an innovative process for decision making or a simple ice breaker.

The following toolkits are curated collections of activities suitable for small groups as well as larger ones. Bookmark them as sources of ideas and inspiration for your next workshops!

Collective Action Toolkit

• Aim: Bring groups together to work on a challenge/solution
• Number of methods: 25
• Unique feature: “Where to next?” section

The Collective Action Toolkit from the Frog Design team was created to help bring groups together to accomplish a shared goal. These activities help problem-solving small and larger challenges concerning a whole community.

The 25 group facilitation techniques are sorted into 6 categories from “imagine more ideas” to “plan for action”. Next to the time frame and group size, you will find the needed materials for the exercise.

At the end of every activity, there is a “where to next?” section which suggests the next ideal step, whether it is an activity or a new section such as “define your problem”. One of the strengths of this collection is its design which complements each activity and also gives visual cues of how an exercise should be done.

Facilitation Tools for Meetings and Workshops

• Aim: Effective group facilitation
• Number of methods: 65
• Unique feature: “Things to be aware of” pointers for each method

This toolkit from Seeds for Change is one of the most thorough compilations of facilitation tools with 65 methods that are available for free. The collection covers most of the main facilitation areas, in an order that follows a typical meeting or workshop.

This includes ideas for warm-ups, increasing participation, prioritizing ideas, trust building, exploring complex issues, ending and evaluating sessions, as well as a generous sprinkling of games and energizers.

In every category, you will find several activities indicating ideal group size and time. Additionally, each practice is completed by a list of “things to be aware of”. These are the nuances, instructions, and inclusion practices a skilled facilitator ought to consider when offering a certain activity. If you are in need of a simple, easy-to-understand and well-structured toolkit, go ahead and take a look!

SessionLab’s Essential Meeting Facilitation Toolkit

• Aim: Effective meeting facilitation
• Number of methods: 12
• Unique feature: Find more about these and other methods in SessionLab’s Library.

Here at SessionLab we’ve created a powerful set of resources to share facilitation practices with the world. You can head over to our newsletter page to sign up to free email courses introducing general facilitation skills (Facilitation is for Everyone!) and tackling some of the most common pitfalls (Facilitation Challenges) to get tips, exercises and reading material delivered to your inbox.

We’ve collected a suite of 12 methods we consider essential to making meetings really work (and that we use ourselves) in the Essential Meeting Facilitation Tookit. Sometimes it can be hard to imagine how methods come together in a coherent flow, especially in a formal work setting such as a team meeting. This essential template puts some of the methods from the toolkit to use; we hope it can give you a sense of how much can be achieved, even in a small group, when facilitation methods are put to good use!

SALTO Youth Quality Handbook on Facilitation

• Aim: Train youth for peer education projects
• Number of Techniques: 15
• Unique features: Based on a real-life training

SALTO-YOUTH is a network of seven resource centers working on European priority areas within the youth field. As part of the European Commission’s Training Strategy, SALTO-YOUTH provides non-formal learning resources for youth workers and youth leaders and organizes training and contact-making activities to support organizations and National Agencies (NAs) within the frame of the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Youth program, the European Solidarity Corps, and beyond.

A number of the organization’s activities are focused on disseminating facilitation skills, especially in the context of youth programs, retreats, exchanges, and training courses.

If you are interested in a peer education approach to facilitation, and looking for activities that really work with younger participants, with a strong intercultural approach, this booklet is for you. Facilitation is Easy includes tips on basic facilitation skills such as co-facilitating and setting up a venue.

An especially interesting aspect of this publication is that it’s based on a real-life youth workshop. No abstractions here! All the activities are detailed as they were actually run, including pictures of the group at work and their posters. A great place to get a better sense of facilitation-based training in action!

For more ideas on introducing newcomers to facilitation you can also check out this template for a half-day beginners workshop.

Manuals to Help You Become a More Skilled Facilitator

The facilitation compilations we have presented so far put an emphasis on hands-on, immediately implementable facilitation techniques and activities, usually according to some kind of categorization. They are good for bringing variation to your existing “facilitator toolbox” of frequently used exercises.

However, sometimes you might need to go back and review the basics of facilitation principles, or you might just be getting familiar with this field. Whatever the case, the next toolkits will help you dive into the more abstract yet equally important part of facilitation: the basic principles and good-to-knows.

All facilitators pretty quickly realize that there is a lot more to guiding groups than just having a good set of activities.

Beyond having a magic box of tools, facilitators must develop an understanding of how groups work, what the possible underlying dynamics are, and what stages a discussion typically undergoes on its way to becoming a successful decision.

Facilitators must understand how to raise, and maintain, energy levels; how to include diverse voices; how to co-create safe space, and more. The following booklets can help you improve your facilitation skills in this direction, and better serve your participants and clients.

FFBS Facilitation Toolkit

• Aim: Understand the process of facilitation
• Number of Techniques: 5
• Unique feature: A walk-through of facilitation processes with handouts

This facilitation toolkit from Care.org is a practical starter toolkit covering all of the important areas a facilitator should know about before actively facilitating groups. FFBS stands for Farmers’ Field and Business Schools, which is an educational and empowerment program for women in agricultural activity in the global south.

As the context indicates, this material is a good starting point for those who are new to the facilitating world. Among the topics, you will find “adult learning”, “qualities of a good facilitator”, “how to moderate exercises” and “giving and receiving feedback”.

Although the focus is more on “how to facilitate” the toolkit also offers some basic facilitation exercises indicating materials and objectives next to the recommended time and group size. If you are only getting familiar with facilitation, or you need to refresh the basics, then make this collection your go-to resource.

NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement Facilitator’s Toolkit

• Aim: Increase interaction and participation at events and meetings
• Number of Techniques: 27
• Unique feature: Top tips about what not to do

The NHS’ Facilitator’s Toolkit is divided in two main sections, with a user-friendly design somewhat reminiscent of a map of metro stations (well, tube stations I guess, this being the UK). The first part contains 27 easy, friendly activities, divided into sections that follow the structure of a typical meeting or event, from getting-to-know-you to closing activities. Do note that these are very much geared to native speakers of English (i.e. some rely on rhyme and alliteration) so make sure you choose those most appropriate to the group you are working with.

While the first part of the booklet is useful in itself with many tried and tested facilitation resources, the final sections really shine. The team putting together this resource has found expert facilitators to provide their top tips: some are scattered along the methods, and others are collected in the second part. With headlines such as “Preparation and venue” and “Managing group dynamics,” these provide clear and practical guidance to anyone wanting to learn more about how facilitators work. The “What not to do!” list at the very end is an absolute gem. What top tips of things not to do would you add?

Transgender Europe’s (TGEU) Facilitator’s Toolkit

• Aim: Learn how to handle power, conflict and diversity
• Number of Techniques: 23
• Unique features: Available in Spanish, and in text-to-speech format.

This Facilitation Toolkit is written by Nim Ralph and Nadia Vogel and is based on their work as facilitators with the European Transgender Council. The Facilitation Toolkit takes a power-critical approach to facilitation.

Anyone gaining more experience as a group facilitator will soon encounter complex challenges related to how to appropriately handle power differences, such as between a manager and a new intern in the workplace, or between founders and newcomers in a volunteer association. This guide offers practical, no-nonsense support to facilitators in need of developing an extra bit of self awareness in the more challenging aspects of the role.

It includes brief guides on understanding power, dealing with conflict, understanding different kinds of learning styles and how to make space for these in your sessions, as well as considering access needs while facilitating or preparing sessions. As is fitting for a guide that explores accessibility with intent, it is available not only just in English but also in Spanish, and in a text-to-speech format (in English).

Resources for Leading Group Discussions

A large part of the facilitator’s job is to carefully lead groups through discussions. You may call this part of the task “moderation”, “directing traffic”, or have your own words for it. The fact is, it may be the most common application of facilitation skills even outside structured, carefully designed workshops.

There are many different ways to lead collective discussions. You’ll need to know how to kindly interrupt, how to pose questions that move the group ahead, as well as how to reformulate, summarize, hold, and reconcile differences.

If you are looking for a tool to help you with this particular part of a meeting or event, here are three interesting sources of knowledge created by organizations working at the intersection of education and policy.

University of Edinburgh’s Facilitator’s Toolkit

• Aim: Integrate reflective practices in higher education
• Number of Techniques: 5 (find them in the Reflection Toolkit section)
• Unique features: Case studies from classroom practice

As we’ve recounted in this article on teachers as facilitators, good classroom practices such as having small group teamwork or well-led discussions have a lot in common with facilitation. In this web-based toolkit, the University of Edinburgh has put together a complete overview of how to employ group discussions and reflective practices in higher education.

Facilitating political discussions booklet

• Aim: Training to work through charged political conversations
• Number of Techniques: 13
• Unique features: Handouts to encourage self-awareness

This packet of workshop materials was put together by Nancy Thomas and Mark Birmhall-Vargas on behalf of the Institute of Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University. Addressing the risk that teachers and university staff might shy away from charged political discourse, they have provided a guideline that may prove uniquely useful to any facilitator looking for facilitation resources directed specifically to having those difficult conversations around political ideology, social identity and power.

This booklet contains great advice on how to set ground rules and navigate the tensions of discussions where there is no clear “wrong” or “right” and participants may feel attacked in their personal beliefs. It includes plenty of tips and handouts to help self-reflection and growth. The advice contained in this guidebook will work with larger groups as well.

Do note that some of the specific exercises included are quite US-centric and some may be dated or not applicable to your group, so you might need to change some handouts and base discussions on topics more relevant to your specific situation.

Talking Climate Workshop guide

• Aim: Learning to host open conversations on a sensitive topic
• Number of Techniques: 7
• Unique features: Focussed on climate change

Last but not least comes a guidebook to facilitating conversations around a very specific topic: talking about climate change. These resources provide practical evidence-based guidance on how you can help friends, family, colleagues, neighbors and any person in your community feel more confident about talking about climate change in their daily lives.

This workshop is based on what the organization Climate Outreach calls REAL TALK:

Respect your conversational partner and find common ground
Enjoy the conversation
Ask questions
Listen, and show you’ve heard

Tell your story
Action makes it easier (but doesn’t fix it)
Learn from the conversation
Keep going and keep connected

The guidebook is short and to the point, and comes with a full workshop script and slide deck you can use or pick up for inspiration; if you want more resources on climate conversations, the same website provides plenty of documentation to study.

In closing

Whether you are a seasoned facilitator with several years of experience behind you or an enthusiastic newbie who has just gotten a taste for this profession, we hope that these facilitation resources will be of value to you and become part of the next steps in your facilitation journey.

Which are your favorites among these toolkits? Do you know of more resources? Please share with us in the comments, or join the discussion in our free, friendly community space; we would love your input and feedback!

As a trainer, educator or facilitator, you have probably experienced that good icebreakers, exercises, and energizer games are essential for an engaging and effective soft skills training.

Soft skills training programs may include different topics, such as effective communication, time management, emotional intelligence, presentation skills, active listening and more. They may be short or part of a more comprehensive program. Certainly, being directed to adult learners, they must include hands-on practice and engaging activities for skill development.

It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your session, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, profile of participants, and the time available.

We are here to help! Below you will find the best free online soft skills resources for trainers, education professionals, and facilitators.

The Best Free Platforms with Soft Skills Training Materials

Refreshing your toolbox of trainer resources is good for experimenting with new ideas and, importantly, in order to avoid falling back upon a popular activity that some of the participants have already done before.

However, finding proven quality exercises on soft skills online is not easy. There are many resources online that are not cheap, and yet their quality is questionable. Even with trusted resources there can still be a lack of essential information that can help you ensure your planned training activities are conducted properly.

Occasionally, you can find some information on professional forums, but usually not in a structured and easily searchable way. Here are 5 great places to go to find libraries of accessible, well-organized methods and tools for teaching soft skills.

BusinessBalls

BusinessBalls.com is one of the most comprehensive collections of free soft skills training materials online. You can find video clips for teaching and training, team-building games, and theories on different topics including time management, strategy and innovation, career success, leadership, and even relationships.

Moreover, the team behind BusinessBalls offers advice on how to enhance your use of the site and the materials and provides an option for asking for new content. They focus on resources and topics that help trainers, L&D professionals, and educators to gain knowledge and inspiration from.

With 230 available courses, there is something for everyone. All the topics are easy to search through and while some require premium membership, you can find plenty of free content as well. All the courses include different articles, videos, and a strong set of extra materials: you can create your own learning path, immersing yourself in topics from organization management to self awareness and many more.

TrainerBubble

As the name indicates, this site offers a great variety of different training games and resources. Icebreakers, training documents, and team building exercises are just a few of the topics you can find on Trainer Bubble along with training videos. Every exercise’s description states the objective, duration, and group size. Additionally, there is an “intended for…” section that gives you a brief overview of how to maximize your use of the activity.

Complete training course materials are available for purchase, but the free training materials section includes what is essentially a starting kit to help you train participants in soft skills. Aside from the games and exercises, there are articles on different topics such as how to lead a brainstorming session or how to do networking, evaluation sheets, and an overview of popular training models.

Training Course Material

This company specializes in selling training packages for the workplace. If what you are looking for is free soft skills training materials though, you can still find support for your creative process in the free material section.

Particularly interesting are the free assessment tools: they give the reader the possibility to self-test on such areas as learning styles and conflict resolution skills. Tests and quizzes are popular with learners, and can make a good addition to a successful soft skills training course.

Every test ends with notes and articles that can be a great place to learn more about soft skills and related topics. Different results from different learners can also form the basis of debrief conversations.

Best Collection of Games and Exercises to Teach Soft Skills

In this section we’ve assembled some of the best places to go if you are looking for individual games, activities and exercises to add some flare to your soft skills training experience. You can find still more in our collection of free online workshop resources.

Thiagi’s Game List

Thiagi’s game list has more than 400 free games and exercises with detailed descriptions, facilitation tips, and debriefing questions, ready-to-run for everyone. What makes these games so powerful is the debriefing section of every exercise. Content is important but success comes only if you can debrief in a way that participants can learn from.

Aside from the games, you can find articles, interviews and podcasts on their site. A significant set of Thiagi games are also available in the SessionLab library, where you can easily filter and search based on ideal group size, time frame and necessary materials.

Hyper Island Toolbox

The Hyper Island Toolbox contains 100+ games and exercises sorted into categories such as energisers, self-leadership or innovation. The latter category is what gives this toolbox an edge: if you are looking for activities for a design-focused workshop or prototyping session, you can easily find it here. Every activity indicates group size, time frame, facilitation level and comfort zone from the participant’s point of view. The instructions are well-written and easy to follow. All of the exercises are available in the SessionLab library as well.

Icebreakers.ws

Icebreakers.ws contains a collection of more than 100 icebreakers sorted by group size and icebreaker type. As the name indicates, it focuses solely on icebreakers, but it does have a great variety of them on the website.

Icebreakers get a bad reputation sometimes. Nobody likes “forced fun”! When picking and presenting an icebreaking, getting-to-know-you or energizing activity, there are three things to keep in mind to ensure they help, not hinder, your learning experience:

• choose an activity that connects to the workshop’s topic. There are plenty of games and quick energizers related, for example, to leadership, good communication or teamwork. Explain the purpose behind the activity and save some time, even a quick 5-min, to debrief learnings.
• learn about your group before choosing activities. What are they comfortable with? What mood suits their style?
• enable people to opt out! Every activity in a course should be an invitation. Give participants options, for example, to step aside and observe the dynamics if they don’t feel like joining a particular icebreaker or game.

Skills Converged Free Training Materials

If you are lost among Skills Converged’s over 500 articles, tips and tools for soft skills training, go check out the guidance in their Introduction Page. You’ll find selected topics and categories to begin with, from how to design a training course to curated collections on motivation, communication, and more.

SessionLab’s Library of Facilitation Techniques

In our own SessionLab library you can find hundreds of methods and activities to support your delivery of soft skills training. This is a crowdsourced collection of over 1200 methods.

You’ll find classics from well-known frameworks such as Liberating Structures, as well as methods tested and added by facilitators across the globe. When using SessionLab’s planner, you can add methods from the library directly into your agenda, making the flow of designing skills training much more effective.

If you have created activities yourself and want to help others succeed, consider adding a new resource as well!

Soft Skills Training Materials on Interpersonal Skills and Emotional Intelligence

The definition of what exactly is a “soft skill” changes depending on who you speak with. It is generally implied to include abilities related to communication and working with other people. This overlaps with facilitation skills, particularly those falling under the broad category of life competences.

Burnout, miscommunication, and workplace conflicts can impact employee happiness, even affecting turnover. Consequently, there is a big market for courses that can help teams improve their people skills in workplace environments.

Session Templates for Interpersonal Skills Training

This half-day agenda for a self-awareness workshop (based on Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why it Matters more than IQ) provides a real-world example of what a training session focused on improving soft skills with managers and co-workers looks like.

People in leadership positions need soft skill training boosts more than anyone. It can be taxing to manage people and figure out the intricacies of conflict resolution or workplace communication! If you are looking for the right sort of activities to upskill leaders’ soft skill abilities on the job, take a look at the flow of this two-day agenda template for a Leadership Development workshop.

More Resources on Emotional Intelligence

If you are interested in how, as trainer, you can help teams develop emotional intelligence, we’ve written an introductory guide to the topic, which lists 25 activities you can facilitate to help build communication skills, empathy, and emotional self-management.

This article on the Positive Psychology page lists still more resources you can dig into if you want to focus on developing emotional intelligence skills.

Soft Skills Training Programs Materials on Feedback

Another vast field of soft skill training covers effective communication and feedback. In fact, learning how to deliver, and receive feedback is possibly the most requested of new skills. Trainers are regularly asked to upskill any new co worker on this topic. The ability to design and deliver an excellent soft skill training with a focus on feedback is bound to bring success!

• a collection of 14 great activities for practicing feedback techniques in order to communicate effectively with your co-workers;
• an in-depth look at what you need to prepare to run a feedback workshop, including information on pre-work to do with your potential client;
• a template for a 2-hour workshop designed to introduce new managers to giving and receiving better feedback with their team.

Further useful trainer resources

Forums and groups can be a great help for finding a specific exercise or theory, gaining some inspiration on delivery or getting feedback on your own ideas. Plus, in this section we are happy to share some more resources which were recommended by our SessionLab community!

Some LinkedIn groups for trainers are:

• Effective and Fun Training Techniques (83k members)
• Training&Development (37k members)
• Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group (185k members)

Further websites recommended by the SessionLab community:

• More than two hundred free articles and resources to develop people and organizations on Nick Heap’s site. Among them you can find some exercises and games as well.
• Skillsconverged.com offers a range of free training resources: 10 training exercises among many other useful templates

If you are interested in solutions that help you in managing your sessions, we have collected no less than 47 of the best free tools for effectively preparing and running training sessions.

Do you have any further suggestions for where to find quality training resources? Share them with us in the comments, or join the conversation in SessionLab’s friendly facilitation community!

A diversity of workshop activities and balanced mix of group facilitation techniques are essential for any facilitated session, be it a strategic workshop, a team retreat, a kick-off meeting, a co-creation session or a regular project meeting.

It takes careful consideration to pick the right interactive workshop resources for your session, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, profile of participants, and available time.

You may already have some favorite exercises for different types of events, but as you facilitate more and more meetings, you might not want to use the same workshop activities over and over again.

So what are the best ways to equip yourself with new group facilitation methods? It’s generally a good idea to offer activities you’ve experienced as a participant yourself: because of this, expert facilitators learn mostly from one another. Joining a community of peers and taking part in festivals and events are great ways to pick up new skills.

When in need of some quick inspiration, or perhaps to find detailed instructions for an activity you are not 100% sure of how to run, there is a myriad of resources online that can help you pick the right tool or technique for a specific meeting. Some are hard to navigate and only offer generic tools, while others provide you with precisely described workshop activities with practical facilitator tips in an easy-to-navigate web environment.

Listed below are our favorite and trusted facilitation resources.

8 Most Popular Facilitation Libraries

In the first part of this article, we will list toolkits beloved by facilitators all over the world. This is based on responses to the 2023 State of Facilitation survey.

There are great reasons for these method libraries to be so popular: they are well-organized, contain versatile, easy-to-use methods, and often include visual assets such as canvases and templates.

Spend time delving into these templates and activities for tried-and-tested sessions and workshops especially if you are starting out as a facilitator and want to make sure you have all the basics covered!

Liberating Structures

The aim of Liberating Structures is to enhance creativity, trust and relational coordination while making every participant feel included and heard in meetings. You can find a structured set of 33 easy-to-learn group facilitation activities on their website. Liberating Structure methods help make meeting processes more explicit and understandable for everyone since it increases the ownership of solutions by including large groups of people.

If you are just starting out with Liberating Structures, then you can find inspiration in several field stories and case studies that suggest sequences of use for the Liberating Structures suite of methods.

Miroverse

One of the first things many facilitators had to do when moving business online due to the Covid-19 lockdowns was learn how to use virtual whiteboards from colleagues who had started working online much earlier.

Since then, the possibilities of what can be done using a collaborative visual tool for sharing knowledge and collecting ideas online have exploded! The Miroverse is a fully searchable collection of hundreds of templates for sessions you can copy and paste to a new board to kick-start your workshop.

Mural templates

If Mural is your visual whiteboard of choice, you will find many sleek and elegant templates ready to used in the Mural template collection. The database is organized by categories, including icebreakers, ideation template, and many more designed especially for education, to facilitate planning, or with Agile practitioners in mind.

Whether to use Miro, Mural, or yet other whiteboards such as a the more basic, but very intuitive, Google Jamboard, depends on personal taste and, sometimes, client priorities. A skilled facilitator should be able to use all of these interchangeably depending on the specific project. Therefore, it’s certainly worth spending time exploring visual whiteboard libraries for knowledge and inspiration, especially if most of your work is remote.

SessionLab Library of facilitation techniques

SessionLab is an online platform providing a workshop planner application and a public library of facilitation techniques. The library hosts more than 700 interactive workshop activities, both coming from organizations sharing their own content (including some like Hyper Island and Gamestorming which are also featured in this list) and individual meeting practitioners sharing their favorite tools with the community.

A unique feature of this library is that it allows you to easily save and use its activities. If you find an activity you like, you can save it for later in your collection of favourite methods. And if you decide to use SessionLab’s free workshop planner tool, you can easily pull any activity from your personal or the public library to your workshop plans, and your workshop agenda’s timing automatically gets updated.

IAF Methods Database

The IAF Methods Database is a set of facilitation tools and techniques collected and curated by members of the International Association of Facilitators. The purpose of the database is to serve facilitators by gathering and making accessible a breadth of facilitation methodologies and techniques. Part of the library – around 60 facilitation activities – is publicly available to explore, while the full library is accessible to IAF members only.

IDEO Design Kit

Human-Centered Design methods are handly collected and packaged on IDEO’s website, where you will find all you need to prepare to lead expert interviews, guide a group into prototyping, and more. And if you are looking for more tools to support your journey into this family of practices you can check out our article on Online Tools for design and innovation processes.

Hyper Island Toolbox

Hyper Island is a creative business school that also offers consulting services. It approaches learning by focusing on collaboration, creativity, and learning by doing. The Hyper Island Toolbox offers a selection of activities to help you do things more creatively and collaboratively in a team or organization. It features both some popular, well-known workshop activities and facilitation methods created by Hyper Island itself.

We turn to Hyper Island, in particular, for solid team-building methods, engaging and meaningful energizers, activities for educators and the kind of basic, essential tools, such as Start-Stop-Continue feedback, that works well in every situation. A great place for beginners too!

The Hyper Island toolbox hosts more than 100 activities on an extremely user-friendly interface that allows browsing by category, time frame and group size. All methods are illustrated with consistent and relevant visuals, making it easy and visually pleasant to browse.

Service Design Tools

Service Design Tools is a project aspiring to create a bridge between academics and practitioners in the design field. What emerged is a great platform for working on design and innovation strategies.

This rich collection can be navigated based on the stage of the design process (research, ideation, prototyping, implementation, evaluation), on the participants you want to focus on (clients, users, stakeholders) and more. A dedicated space is set aside for Enhanced Tools, that is, frameworks for engaging with high levels of complexity.

7 More Great Toolkits for Group Activities

We highlighted the seven platforms above due to their popularity and ease of use, each of them offering useful filters and search options. Thus, if you want to find an exercise for a specific purpose (e.g. team building) with a given time frame and group size, you can easily filter by these criteria.

However, there are many other gems on the web, too. Hard as it is to pick, here other 7 toolkits we recommend you get familiar with:

Gamestorming

Gamestorming is a set of co-creation tools used by innovators around the world to facilitate meetings in the business world. These innovative activities aim to make meetings a great experience for participants while still delivering on effectiveness, short timeframes and action.

You can find more than 50 Gamestorming activities with detailed step-by-step guides on the official Gamestorming website. And if you like a good old printed version to look over the Gamestorming methods all at once, you might like the Gamestorming book itself, too!

Thiagi Group’s games

Thiagi’s website offers more than 400 free games and exercises with detailed descriptions, facilitation tips, and debriefing questions, ready-to-run for everyone. If you want to filter your search among the games, you might visit the SessionLab library where you can find a significant set of these activities shared with Thiagi’s permission. There you are able to search and filter based on tags, time and group size to find the activity you need.

Design Method Toolkit

The Digital Society School Design Method Toolkit is a well-organized collection of design and research methods that enables you to get started and enrich your design process. You can find more than 50 practical tools with step-by-step guides on how to run design research, ideation, experimentation and creation within short iterations. If you run agile, team-based projects, then you will find useful inspiration in this toolkit.

Design A Better Business Toolbox

Are you already familiar with the Business Model Canvas and the ingenious way it helps structure thinking on developing a business model? This toolbox offers a great collection of templates and canvases in a style similar to the BMC, mostly related to business design, such as the storytelling canvas, customer journey canvas, persona canvas and many more. You can find step-by-step guides on how to use each framework coupled with downloadable templates to use in your workshop.

Untools for Better Thinking

Untools for Better Thinking is a collection of practices designed to look at the world through a different lens. Sometimes it’s complexity theory, sometimes it’s systems innovation: there are only about 20 practices to be mastered here, but each one is rich in insights.

Any one of these tools alone can lead to improved decision-making and form the basis of rich insightful workshop experiences. Bookmark this page if you are working in multistakeholder environments where problems never have a linear solution or if you want more ideas for working in a volatile and ever-changing world.

Project Zero’s Thinking Routines toolbox

This database was designed with classroom teaching in mind. The proposed methods are meant to stimulate discussion, engage students, deepen students’ thinking and help make that thinking visible.

The strategies collected here by the Harvard Graduate School for Education’s Project Zero will therefore serve workshop designers well, particularly if you are working at the intersection of training and facilitation. And if you are a teacher or professor looking for ways to introduce more facilitative approaches into your classroom, this is an excellent place to start!

Facilipedia by Mischief Makers

Facilipedia is a growing, curated shortlist of resources from the playful group of facilitators known as Mischief Makers. It’s a great introduction to facilitation for beginners to browse, as they’ve collected all-time favorites and added careful instructions to get you going. Take a look at their case studies as well for stories of engagement in practice!

4 Treasure chests of Hands-on Activities for Social Change

Workshops can help teams and groups achieve extraordinary results together. And there are many areas of social and environmental work where collective action is ever more important in our challenging world. Here are three toolkits dedicated especially to those brave people around the world who are exploring new strategies and approaches to cultural change.

Changemakers Xchange Resources for Changemakers

Changemakers Xchange is a global community of over 1000 changemakers, many of whom train as facilitators for social innovation. Their collection of resources is an inspiring read if you are preparing to deliver workshops on climate change, activism or inclusion.

Some of the team behind Changemakers Xchange are also in charge of the Recipes for Wellbeing, a lovely collection of activities for taking care of personal and collective wholeness. With practices for a healthier mind, body, heart and soul which can easily be integrated into your workshop flow.

ClimateKIC’s Visual Toolbox for System Innovation

When it comes to gathering diverse groups around a table to talk about serious, system-wide change and how to get there, nothing quite beats a visual canvas everyone can gather around and work with.

The EU organization ClimateKIC (the KIC stands for Knowledge Innovation Community) has a long experience setting up workshops in multi-stakeholder environments such as at the city or district level. Their 170-page free visual toolkit includes 16 canvases that make tough concepts related to system innovation and sustainability accessible and actionable.

Seeds for Change

Seeds for Change is a UK-based cooperative supporting the efforts of campaigners everywhere and has long hosted a collection of activities, tips, games and other resources. A great place to look for materials for workshops on conflict transformation and consensus decision-making.

Greaterthan

You can spend days learning from the incredible amount of resources on decentralised organising and changemaking collected by the Greaterthan collective. The place to go if you are interested in exploring the cutting edge of organisational change.

More Resources from SessionLab

Here at SessionLab we offer a wide array of resources for workshop planning and design. Here are some for you to explore:

Session Templates

When diving deeper into facilitation and workshop design, practitioners soon discover that there is an art to creating sequences of activities that truly make sense, deliver results and create environments conducive to learning. You can find some great examples in what Liberating Structures calls “strings”, logical sequences of different activities that lead participants fluidly in and out an experience.

To see how activities come together to create a coherent event, meeting or workshop, whether it lasts 2 hours or 4 days, head over to our template collection: there you will find curated agendas as delivered in real-life by skilled facilitators all over the world.

Using the SessionLab planner, you can create your next agenda based on any one of these templates, and adapt it to your own needs. The Essential Workshop Structure might be the right place to start if you are planning to lead a small group to solve a problem together.

SessionLab is also a friendly community where you can swap stories and tips with fellow facilitators. Join the conversation!

Keep learning

Choosing the best activity for a workshop is only part of the skill of designing and leading collaborative experiences. In our blog you can find articles on how to plan and design workshops as well as on the skills to develop to become excellent workshop facilitators.

Last but not least, join the newsletter for curated selections of our favorite activities from the library. If you are starting out at facilitation, you might want to join our (free) email course Facilitation is for Everyone! for tips delivered straight to your inbox every week.

We believe these online resources are worth checking out if you are looking for new tools and techniques for your next workshop or meeting. We hope they will save you time and help you find new and effective activities.

Which is your favorite resource for workshop activities?

Let us know in the comments! We also greatly appreciate if you share any further suggestions for free useful workshop resources.

Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. In this post, we’ll share our favorite online tools you can use to make your job as a facilitator easier.

In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can use to become more productive when in the process of preparing or following up on a facilitated session.

We collected the most useful tools we have encountered while talking to SessionLab users: facilitators, corporate trainers, and service designers as well as our own personal experiences. Many of these tools also include a fully functional free version available without time limitation so you can incorporate them into your workflow easily! 

We grouped the tools according to the tasks they are primarily used for so you can find precisely what you need. The primary use case we considered was to support a digital facilitation process while running workshops. Most of these tools are equally useful when you need to prepare for other online sessions or work with virtual teams.

Let’s jump in!

• Meeting and agenda planning: SessionLab, Google Sheets
• Online whiteboards: Miro, Mural, Stormboard, FigJam
• Virtual facilitation platforms: Stormz, Butter, Thing.Online, Toasty.ai, Klaxoon
• Virtual space tools: Spatial, Gather, Welo
• Engagement tools: Mentimeter, Slido, Kahoot
• Video conferencing: Zoom, Whereby, Skype, Google Meet, Big Marker
• Survey tools: Google Forms, Typeform, SurveyMonkey
• File storage and document sharing: DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box
• Online communication tools: Slack, MS Teams, Discord, Chanty
• Online Learning Platforms: Padlet, LearnWorlds, Nearpod, Teachable
• Task management: Trello, Todoist, Asana, Notion
• Note-taking apps: Evernote, OneNote, Google Drive & Docs
• Online design tools: Canva, Figma, Invision

In 2022 SessionLab ran a survey of over 1100 facilitators from all over the world. A whole section was dedicated to tools, and you can now read the results in the State of Facilitation Report. What tools do facilitators use for design, delivery, and evaluation of sessions?

Based on these results, online tools coexist alongside pen, paper and sticky notes for session design, while whiteboards and videoconferencing software have become essential for session delivery. Go to the report to learn more! Is your favorite tool not on the list? Let us know in the comments or start a discussion in our Community!

Meeting and agenda planning

If you are planning to facilitate a group session that spans more than a couple of hours and you have different workshop activities, theory blocks, team building games and energizer activities, then you likely need to have some sort of agenda to plan the sequence of these activities.

A simple pen and paper might just do the trick for you, but what if you’re working together with some other people on the agenda or simply need to share it with your client? If you want to avoid having dozens of different versions of Excel or Word files, then an online agenda builder might come in handy!

SessionLab

SessionLab is an online workshop planner tool for anyone who designs and facilitates workshops and meetings. It provides a drag and drop interface that is designed for the flexible and iterative process of building up a workshop or meeting agenda – making your process design work a real flow experience. 

When it comes to running your workshop, stay on time with Time Tracker and adjust your agenda on the fly. You can collaborate in real-time, create a personal library of reusable assets and create quality printouts to share with your clients.

If you’re looking for new inspiration, you can find more than 1000 workshop activities in a public library of facilitation methods and a set of expert-designed complete workshop templates too. And yes, we’re blowing our own horn, but mainly because we’re facilitators too and we love using it!

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a worthwhile online alternative to Microsoft Excel. So if you are a hardcore spreadsheets fan loving to tinker with rows and columns to turn them into workshop timetables then Google Sheets offers you most of the features you need for creating and sharing session agendas.

Real-time commenting and revision tracking is highly useful for collaborative work and integration with Google Drive cloud storage allows you to easily find content in your sessions in your Drive.

Online whiteboard tools

Online whiteboards offer an endless flexible space where you can collaborate and share ideas. You can create an online canvas and use that as a simple whiteboard for jotting down ideas, or as an infinite board for building a project with a remote team. They allow the creation of mockups and schemes, you can quickly add stickers, write down ideas and leave feedback.

Complex problem-solving can be made easier by using a visual platform to brainstorm and collaborate. Online whiteboards are not only useful for preparing your workshop with a remote team, but also for online meeting facilitation. They can also help to replicate the feeling of working together in person. Here are our favorites!

Miro

Miro is one of the most popular online whiteboards on the market. It offers a flexible suite of features and templates that make it easy to start collaborating remotely.

We particularly love Miro’s large collection of integrations and apps – there are so many ways to do something exciting for your virtual workshop with Miro. It also scales well with large numbers of participants and it’s easy to invite people to the board in the middle of a session. Miro includes a free version that offers up to 3 boards for your team. 

Miro and Mural were mentioned in the State of Facilitation in 2023 report as the top two most-used whiteboards, so you’re in good company if you choose either of these for your next online session!

Mural

Mural is a versatile online whiteboard tool for remote team meetings. It is particularly strong as a tool for teams, allowing you to create different rooms for your board with differentiated access rights. It offers a wide range of workshop and meeting templates, including planning, design, issue analysis and idea generation board templates.

We’ve found Mural one of the best solutions for creating visually pleasing whiteboards and it’s been used by many conference organizers as a result. Mural’s free plan includes 3 murals with unlimited members.

Stormboard

Stormboard focuses on helping facilitators with idea generation, organization, and prioritization. You can add different types of notes, combine them together, comment in threads, and vote on ideas using colored dots.

Stormboard also has a strong reporting functionality that allows you to instantly turn your online sticky notes into structured meeting reports. Great when working with external clients. For a more guided approach to virtual meetings, Stormboard is a worthy option of online whiteboard. The free version offers 5 boards with a maximum 5 collaborators for each.

FigJam

Figma is a great design tool for visual collaboration. FigJam is an online whiteboard that is especially useful for teams wanting to ideate around their Figma designs and collect all their online collaborations in one ecosystem.

FigJam is simple and intuitive to use and we love that we can access our designs easily. You can even add widgets such as a code editor and donut for team building! FigJam features a free version with 3 FigJam files and unlimited collaborators. 

Virtual facilitation platforms 

While Zoom still dominates as a video conferencing tool, what about when you’re facilitating workshops that require more bespoke features? Or how about if you’d prefer to host your agenda, engagement tools and video software in one place? 

These virtual facilitation platforms are designed to be a single spot for all your facilitation needs. They can be great if you’re not already wedded to a video platform or prefer having all your tools in one spot. 

Stormz

Stormz is an app for professional facilitators. It enables you to design and facilitate digital and live workshops in one platform. 

You can use Stormz to ask your participants to give their input on questions you generate in the app, generate ideas and make collective decisions directly from their laptop, tablet or mobile phone. It’s a great way to create engagement and visualize responses during a session. 

Stormz also offers a unique on-site solution to manage large group workshops involving hundreds of participants by using their portable Stormz Box device which provides secure and reliable local network infrastructure for collaborative workshops at any venue.

Butter 

Butter is a new video conferencing tool dedicated to online meeting facilitation that is packed full of features. With in-built polls, icebreakers, a queue to enable equal participation, and time tracking, Butter is an effective alternative to Zoom for facilitators.

Butter has a free plan for up to 100 participants running 60-minute group sessions. It’s certainly worth looking at if you’re looking for a more robust facilitation toolbox in your video conferencing software.

Thing.Online

Thing.online is a virtual facilitation platform that aims to recreate the feel of a live workshop online. With features like spatial discussions, breakout tables and integrations, Thing.Online aims to provide a single space for facilitating complex online events.

We like that Thing.online makes moving between presentations and individual discussions easy while keeping all your materials available and easy for participants to access. Running a virtual conference with a mix of keynote speakers and workshops? Thing.online might be the tool for you. 

Toasty.ai

Combining interactivity and video conferencing, Toasty.ai seeks to make meetings more engaging and interactive. In the left sidebar, you’ll find features like icebreakers, polls and whiteboard integrations you can add to your virtual meeting in a cinch. The integrated polling made for a simple participant experience, and Toasty features a heap of host tools to make running meetings easy too. 

Toasty.ai’s pricing is based on the number of agendas and participants in your sessions. Get started for free with 3 agendas and 20 participants and move up to premium plans as your scope expands.

Klaxoon

Designed for those wanting to run more engaging online meetings and workshops, Klaxoon aims to be the one tool you need for online delivery. With a suite of features including a virtual collaboration space, polls, engagement apps, and more, Klaxoon can empower and uplift your online meetings. 

The free version of Klaxoon includes a one-shot template with up to 15 participants, though you can also try the full version of Klaxoon with a 30-day trial.

Virtual space tools

Virtual space tools are great for creating an online alternative to a physical event or office space. With these tools, you can create virtual events and conferences that recreate that sense of navigating a festival ground or moving from keynote speeches to breakout rooms. You might even create a virtual office where people can gather, work and have chance interactions.

Virtual spaces such as those below can help create a sense of wonder and excitement in participants, though note that they do often require more set-up and overhead that a simple virtual meeting. For the right use case, they can be more than worth this time investment and can add something special to your team’s online interactions.

Spatial Chat

Spatial Chat is a wonderful combination of video conferencing and virtual space designed to help remote teams work together. We used Spatial to host many of our Christmas events. Being able to move around the space and sit next to the virtual fire or arrange into teams for a quiz certainly elevated our experience! 

Spatial Chat is free to start with teams of 5, though if you want to record meetings and have more than 3 rooms, you’ll want to look at some of their premium plans. It’s a great way to make digital facilitation more organic and engaging.

Gather 

For teams looking for a virtual space that encourages playfulness, Gather might be the best shout. By including avatars that you move through a virtual space, Gather feels like an old-school videogame! It brings a sense of fun and embodiment to remote working, while also featuring heaps of tools to boost productivity.

We loved the customization features of Gather, and for teams that are looking for something different in a virtual space, it’s worth playing with! Fully virtual teams looking for ways to connect and have fun outside of Zoom energizers will find lot’s to love here.

Welo

Conference and virtual events looking for a festival atmosphere should check out Welo. With a bird-eye-view style that emulates maps or isometric games, Welo is great for creating large-scale events and conferences online. Welo has a whole suite of features for virtual events and team building, but we especially love how easy it is to explore. 

Our experiences in Welo have been memorable, such as attending NeverDoneBefore festival for facilitators. We love what’s possible in this platform and the potential wow factor a virtual conference organizer can achieve here! Welo is free to try and integrates with Zoom, too! 

Engagement tools

Engagement tools are a suite of tools that allow you to quickly poll participants, run quizzes, visualize responses and even run simple games inside your meetings and events. This kind of workshop engagement tool can be key to creating memorable experiences. For virtual team building sessions and remote teams, this can be the missing ingredient to truly engage and delight participants. 

For facilitators, such tools can also be useful to get feedback or facilitate group discussions in a way that makes sense for an online session. Quickly getting a read on how a group of 100 participants is feeling can be so helpful for determining the next stage of your workshop!

Mentimeter

Mentimeter allows you to create questions (such as multiple choice questions) in their web application and participants can answer them from their mobile devices. The great thing is that you can instantly visualize everyone’s opinion and display the results in real-time to the group. It helps your participants to feel engaged, which is especially important for a large group workshop. 

Mentimeter works really well on mobile devices with a streamlined user experience and the free version allows you to create two polls and five quiz questions per presentation.

Slido

Slido also offers participant polling functionality and a mobile app for your participants. The free version allows you to have 3 polls per event. Similarly to Mentimeter, it also supports Q&A, so your meeting participants can post their questions at any time via the mobile application.

Slido has a heap of integrations including Google Slides and Microsoft Teams. We also loved the analytics suite: polling large groups and visualizing outputs in a word cloud was also a neat engagement feature that can help elevate your sessions. 

Kahoot

Kahoot is an online platform for creating and sharing learning games with large audiences. It has a suite of features that make it great for classrooms, board meetings and workshops alike.

You can even create self-paced assignments for asynchronous engagement: great for hyping up a group before or between sessions. By using prizes and rewards, Kahoot’s engagement tool is a great way to gamify your virtual sessions.  

Video conferencing tools

In a world of remote work and digital facilitation, video conferencing tools have become near mandatory. Many of us spend our working days inside virtual meetings and video chats, so choosing the right video tool is important!

Whether you’re looking for a simple drop-in solution or something more robust for your next webinar, these video conferencing tools are some of the best. Each aims to make it easier to connect and work together online. You can expect to see screen-sharing options, participant management tools and useful integrations with other software too! 

Zoom

Zoom provides exceptionally reliable quality, minimizing audio or video latency issues that you usually encounter with most video conferencing applications. It has a wide variety of features available both for individual and business needs including the scheduling of calls, a dial-in phone number and recording audio and video calls even on the free service plan. The only downside is the 40-minute call limit.

One of the benefits of using Zoom for digital facilitation is audience familiarity. Most people working remotely are now familiar with the tool and you rarely need to explain how to use it. It’s become the industry standard for good reason – it just works! With integrations, you can also use many of your favorite tools inside your meeting, making it a robust and simple option for your virtual sessions. 

Whereby

Whereby comes in to help when all other tools fail: you just open a video conferencing room, send the link to your guests and they can join without having to install any application or create an account. (Only a browser extension is needed to be added).

Whereby is a lightweight video chat tool with fewer features than Zoom but offers unprecedented ease of use. The free plan offers group video conferencing and screen sharing up to 4 people with one fixed meeting room. There’s no need to create different meeting links each time, the same link will work for your team to meet anytime. We enjoyed using Whereby for quick meetings and to chat about something that email or Slack couldn’t cover. 

Skype

Skype was among the first players in peer-to-peer video conferencing and as it has been widely adopted now it’s often a straightforward option for calling contacts who have Skype accounts.

As the market has expanded, Skype has grown to include screen sharing, group video conferencing, and file sharing too. Though it lacks some of the more collaborative elements of other tools, it’s pretty good for a free option! For peer-to-peer communication with businesses and clients who prefer phone calls, Skype still has a place in your video and audio toolbox.

Big Marker

If you’re hosting online workshops and conferences with large numbers of people and need to handle ticketing and recordings, Big Marker might be the tool for you. It’s especially useful for those running webinars and who want to create a content hub of past sessions.

Breakout groups for workshops might not be as intuitive as Zoom, but it’s easy to run conference-style sessions with speakers, Q&As and presentations. Creating a repository of recordings on your channel is a great feature that can be a massive boon if you’re running an ongoing series or training course. 

Google Meet

Google’s popular messaging app offers an easy-to-use video conferencing tool that works really well even if you need to talk with people both in and outside your organization. Having a native integration with Google Calendar and Gmail means this tool gets a lot of use here at SessionLab!

Additionally, Google Meet offers many standard features such as breakout rooms, attendance tracking, and live streaming. While it may not be as robust as some of the other tools on this list, it is easy to use and requires little setup.

Online survey tools for needs assessment or evaluation

If you ask for feedback from participants and you want to go beyond using ‘happy sheets’, paper forms filled out right after the workshop on the spot, then you may decide to create an online survey after the session. 

Alternatively, you might want to conduct a needs assessment survey while preparing your session. You can choose from a wide range of online survey tools that can do the job for you, ranging in complexity and use case. Here are some of our favorite tools for data collection and surveys. 

Google Forms

Google Forms allow you to create unlimited surveys with 6 types of questions and skip logic that can guide your participants through your survey depending on their answers.

The service has seamless integration with Google’s other apps including Gmail, Google Sheets and Drive, allowing you to take advantage of file storage and simple results sharing too. Google Forms also has a great advantage: unlike most of the competition that has usage limits in their free versions, Google Forms is absolutely free.

Typeform

Typeform has made filling out forms engaging and interactive. The forms look fresh and modern, promising that users are more likely to enjoy the survey experience and complete it. It also offers some great insights on response rates and question drop-offs to help you improve your surveys and polls.

Typeform offers three surveys with a maximum of 10 questions and 100 responses in the free version while the paid version adds extra features, such as advanced question types and conditional logic.

Survey Monkey

Having been around since 1999, SurveyMonkey is one of the longest-running online survey services in the world. SurveyMonkey does the basics and does them well, providing a reliable alternative that has heaps of integrations with other tools. In the free survey version, however, you will be limited to 10 questions, 40 respondents per survey and no possibility to export your data.

Cloud storage and document sharing with your co-workers

For most projects you take part in, sooner or later you will have an endless amount of documents: meeting memos, PowerPoint decks, a batch of documents you receive from your client and dozens of spreadsheets with session agendas, registration forms… and the list can be continued.

Online file storage and sharing solutions allow you to store all your files in the cloud and access them whether you are on your desktop, phone or tablet. What’s more, you can easily share the documents with your colleagues and work on them simultaneously: a must for any data collection process and effective project management too.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a pioneer in this market with their reliable and easy-to-use syncing and file-sharing system. The free option offers 2GB of storage, although the full-text search that helps you find any piece of information within your document is only available in the paid version. The service is very easy to set up and rightfully praised for its clean design.

Google Drive

Google Drive, offering 15GB free storage, this has the added benefit of a built-in office suite where you can edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations even if you created the document in another program. Working together real-time on shared Google documents is a great feature and, similar to Dropbox, you can easily invite collaborators to any document or folder.

As with some of the other tools on this list, it’s worth noting that many people are fluent in Google Drive and have a linked Gmail account. Even if you prefer Notion or One Drive, having a Google Drive for working with clients in that ecosystem is helpful. 

OneDrive

OneDrive offers 5GB of free storage, a seamless integration to Windows, therefore it works especially well if you have a Windows PC, tablet and phone, and need to get to your files from any device with minimum effort. if you use Microsoft Teams or Office 365, chances are this is already part of your tech stack. As with Google Drive, it pays for digital facilitators working with different clients to have some familiarity with this tool.

Box

As with many online tools, some of your clients might be sensitive about having data about their business stored in the cloud. For this reason, it’s useful to consider Box, which has more sophisticated collaboration and privacy control options for business and enterprise users.

Collaborating across devices and ecosystems with peace of mind and advanced security features makes Box a worthwhile alternative to some of the basic file storage options above.

Online communication tools

Successful workshops and meetings are built on effective communication and this is even more true in online settings. While many meetings can be done over free video chat software, finding online communication tools that work asynchronously or allow groups to work together over longer periods have their place in your toolbox too.

When working with clients, co-facilitators or internal teams, you’ll often be working collaboratively and asynchronously. Email often isn’t conducive to these kinds of back-and-forth conversations and so the online communication tools below have a chance to shine!

Slack

If you work as a team online, chances are you have tried Slack. Slack is designed to make working with others easy and is full of features that help groups and teams connect, chat, and share in a virtual space. The free version of Slack has everything you need to communicate better online with your co-facilitators, clients, and workshop participants: a workspace, channels, 1:1 calls, 5GB of file storage, and up to ten integrations.

As an asynchronous tool, it’s wonderful for using with hybrid events or longer sessions that span multiple days. Ensuring groups can stay connected and ask questions in the right place can help ensure everyone is on the same page, even across time zones. 

Microsoft Teams

Coming as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of tools, Microsoft Teams is group chat software designed to help teams collaborate across text chat, video and audio calls, and more.

By tightly integrating with familiar tools like Excel and Word, Microsoft Teams can help a team integrate their workflow and communication channels with ease! The free version offers storage of 2 GB/user and 10 GB of shared storage, 1:1 and group meetings and much more!

Discord

Immensely popular with gamers, streamers, and developers, Discord features a heap of features and is free and easy to use, making it a great alternative to other online communication tools. Discord’s free version features screen sharing, voice chat, and no member or message limits.

For longer training courses and learning communities, Discord can prove to be a great tool that can be an ongoing source of communication and information usable for everyone in the group.

Chanty

A business messenger tool, Chanty is a great alternative to Slack and other messaging apps. With competitive pricing, a fully-featured free version, and built-in task management, Chanty can be your online communication tool of choice. Chanty’s free version allows ten team members to collaborate and communicate online, and it features unlimited chat history, voice messages and audio calls, and more.

Online Learning platforms 

Delivering online courses, workshops, and training sessions can be made easier by using a dedicated learning platform. These tools are designed for hosting classes, sharing materials, setting tasks, and for presenting more complex sessions or courses over a longer period of time. 

We’d especially recommend such a system if you’re setting up an ongoing development or training program internally or for a client. Centralizing learning resources and keeping records can be what makes or breaks such a program!

Padlet 

Padlet is an online learning platform that can work for everyone from virtual teachers to facilitators, managers, and course leaders too! Padlet is flexible enough to be used to publish course materials online, collaborate with others, or to deliver online sessions. Especially for those involved in online teaching, it’s well worth exploring!

Padlet’s free version includes 3 boards, which is plenty to start collaborating or for delivering an online course or workshop!

LearnWorlds

For large-scale training programs and development processes, LearnWorlds is a great learning platform. You can build comprehensive in-house programs or courses you can deliver to clients again and again. LearnWorlds has a free trial, but it is one of the more expensive learning management solutions on this list. 

If you’re an agency or in-house training provider looking for a platform for hosting your courses, this could be what you’re looking for. If you’re running shorter workshops or courses and want something that requires less set-up, one of the other tools on this list might be more suitable. 

Nearpod

Nearpod is an online teaching platform primarily designed for teachers and facilitators involved in e-learning and virtual course delivery. Nearpod features a library of learning methods and formative assessments to help make online learning interactive and a suite of features to enable virtual teaching. 

Nearpod has a free version that allows 100MB of storage, 40 students per session, and 20+ formative assessments too. Absolutely check it out if you’re a teacher or a facilitator regularly working with students. 

Teachable

Teachable is a platform for creating and selling online courses. While it’s often used by content creators wanting to monetize their knowledge, facilitators and trainers can make use of the easy-to-use platform to create courses to support digital faciliation too!

Teachable is very simple to use out of the gate. While it lacks some of the customization features of the other tools here, Teachable is great for putting together a course at speed. If you’re switching to an asynchronous model and need a learning management system in a snap, it’s a great choice. 

Task management and collaboration tools

Do you have an endless to-do-list while managing multiple facilitation assignments? Arranging client meetings, working on designs and aligning with co-facilitators: the list can feel endless when you need to juggle multiple sessions and manage projects.

There are a vast amount of task management software tools available on the market. Some are part of complex project management suites, while others are dedicated only to keeping your tasks in order. You can find our favorite ones below.

Trello

Trello offers a flexible and visual way to organize anything with anyone. Trello is organized in boards inspired by Kanban methodology. You can add lists to the board and cards to the lists. Each card can have individual checklists, uploaded documents or pictures, and discussion in the form of comments.

Trello is an effective project management tool for any complex task, though it’s especially useful when collaborating with a team. It’s often favoured by lean teams using Scrum and other agile practices.

Todoist

Todoist is more specialized towards personal organization in their free plan: you can compile tasks and subtasks into simple lists which is practical to use for a specific workshop.

One of the handy features is that it tracks progress over time and gives you insight into your personal productivity trends. The app monitors how many tasks you’re completing and gives karma points as rewards for accomplishing them.

Todoist allows you to switch between Kanban and simple to-do lists, and it can be used to itemize recurring tasks too. When trying to balance bigger projects with business-as-usual tasks, Todoist is a great shout for the solo facilitator. 

Asana

If you have a bigger project you may want to use more specialized project management software to help your team collaborate without getting flooded by emails. Asana is an intuitive task-management system that works best for teams seeking real-time interaction and its basic version is free for up to 15 users.

As with the other tools in this section, Asana has an easy-to-use mobile version that allows syncing over devices. Where they differ is in the specialization: Asana, for example, is great for working on complex tasks with many stakeholders and contributors. Check it out if this is what you and your client are after!

Notion

Notion is a sophisticated workspace app with a sleek design. It offers a highly flexible interface for doing everything from managing work, creating to-do lists, and organizing your tasks into tables, kanban boards, and calendar views. Many organizations use Notion as their internal documentation and collaboration center too! This flexibility is great if you like to tinker and tweak settings to create a perfect workspace to fit your needs.

For virtual teams, Notion becomes much more powerful and can be used to collaborate and organize work, much in the same way as Google or Microsoft’s suite of tools. We use Notion at SessionLab and we love it!

Note-taking apps and organizing information

Noting down various bits of information during a session design process is crucial: when talking with clients, jotting down some personal follow-up steps, saving useful links, and so on. Having your trusted notebook with you is essential to register all the information you need in one place, but organizing, finding, and sharing your notes is easier when using digital tools.

Doing this online has never been easier. There are plenty of apps that allow you to write down thoughts, sync them across devices and share them with your colleagues. Below you can find the most popular options with somewhat different strengths.

Evernote

Evernote lets you easily capture, organize, and find content from the Web. You can highlight text on the web, take screenshots, write your own notes, etc. The notes can be tagged, shared, and formatted (to some extent) and you can even assign tasks to them. We like that Evernote also has some robust presentation features, and supports visual note-taking – it’s a blast using it on a tablet!

Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft OneNote has a similar set of features to Evernote but the approach in organizing your notes is different. OneNote supports a more defined structure, as you can have several levels of notebooks, pages, and subpages. It also provides richer formatting options, which are especially useful when doing creative work as it allows you to start typing anywhere on the page.

Google Docs

We mentioned Google Drive combined with Google Docs earlier as a full-stack alternative for cloud storage and document management. Using Google Docs for collaborative note-taking in combination with a well-structured Drive and be a great way to simplify note-taking. It also has the benefit of offline doc support, easy collaboration and synchronization to multiple devices.

Google Docs isn’t expressly designed for note-taking, but when running virtual sessions, we’ve found it to be a reliable and simple way to take notes.

A key bit of advice for any facilitator taking notes: whatever software you choose, you actually need to remember to use it! These tools really become useful when all your notes are in the same place and you can use powerful search and sharing features to share insights with your clients. 

For taking quick notes during a meeting, you can actually use SessionLab’s simple notes feature. This is useful for keeping track of what changed during a live workshop, or leaving instructions for a co-facilitator. 

Online design tools

When running sprints or design workshops, being able to collaboratively work on visual assets for product and marketing initiatives can often mean the difference between a productive or unproductive session. 

Whether you’re brainstorming, prototyping or aligning on final designs, these collaborative design tools can be hugely beneficial to your sessions. It can be especially useful to work with something asynchronously before a meeting, leaving comments and suggestions that a designer might iterate on before a sign-off session.

Canva

For facilitators wanting to create visual assets for their online workshops or participants working together on new materials during a workshop, Canva is a great tool that makes creating beautiful designs easy. Canva really shines when it comes to ease of use and the fact it enables less design-savvy individuals and teams to create something attractive quickly and easily.

Canva’s free version includes real-time collaboration, 5GB of cloud storage, and hundreds of thousands of free images and graphics to help you create great designs!

Figma

Figma is a great design tool that works to help designers and collaborators create and test prototypes together. Like Invision, Figma lives in the cloud, and so designs and prototypes are updated and ready for everyone who needs them instantly. With some unique and interesting features like the Arc tool and Vector Networks, Figma is well worth checking out for any folks involved in virtual design workshops.

Figma has a free plan that offers unlimited viewers, 2 editors and 3 projects and is great if you need to work together on visual assets as a part of a small team.

Invision

Invision is a design tool that is well suited to remote teams wishing to work on product or feature prototypes collaboratively online. It features a whole suite of features to support every part of the design process – freehand mode is great for commenting and ideating on a design, while Studio is awesome for creating and showing off prototypes with animations and interactions.

Invision’s free plan is suitable for individuals and small teams and supports up to 3 active users working on up to 3 documents and unlimited freehands.

What’s next?

Tools are only part of the solution and while they can make your work easier, the quality of your sessions will come from a thoughtfully designed workshop. Check out our post on how to design a workshop for help designing an effective session.

Need help with digital facilitation? Check out our guide for facilitating a meeting to get tips on engaging your participants!

All these online tools are worth checking out, and hopefully, they will save you time and make your facilitation-related work go even more smoothly.

Which is your favorite online tool from the list?

Let us know in the comments, and also if you missed something on the list!

In this recorded webinar, we’ll design a remote problem-solving template from the ground up. You’ll see first-hand how to design workshops quickly and easily, as well as picking up some valuable tips and tricks for facilitating remote workshops in virtual environments.

Alongside the recording, you’ll find the workshop template also see a collection of questions and answers from our previous session concerning everything from session design to online tools and remote facilitation.

Let’s dig in!

• Watch the webinar
• SessionLab template
• Mural board
• Q&A

Watch the webinar

Use the workshop template

Get started with the remote problem-solving workshop template and modify it to your needs. Add new blocks, edit the session, or run it as is!

View the Mural board

We recommend using an online whiteboard when running remote or virtual workshops. For this session, we used Mural and you can see the Mural board for this below.

Q&A

Thanks to everyone who attended and asked questions during this webinar. We’ve pulled all those useful or pertinent questions and answered them here for your reference. Have some additional questions after watching? Get in touch in the comments below!

Preparation

Q: Are you designating that decision-maker ahead of the meeting or democratically in the meeting?

A: Yes, before the meeting it should be made clear who the decision-maker is. This is often communicated in the invite email alongside any other preparation materials. You can choose democratically when starting if you wish. Your decision-maker is often the product owner, team leader or most senior/executive participant in the session. 

Q: If you’re using a tool like Mural, do you send people upfront a link to get to know the tool or do you foresee an exercise to do that?

A: Either can work, but if they are starting with Mural, I’d recommend to have an intro exercise to help master using it, often in the form of an icebreaker.

Q: How do you best prepare your group for using a tool like Mural, without having to burn precious time at the start of your session on familiarisation?

A: In our experience, there is a small learning curve for getting familiar with Mural. One practical tip is having an icebreaker at the start that requires people doing something in Mural or to have a short separate session just for familiarisation of the tool, so that the actual time in session is not lost. 

Alternatively, if your audience is less tool-savvy or you’re worried about introducing more tools, simpler tools such as Google Slides can work as well, as people tend to be more familiar with them.

Online whiteboards

Q: We’re currently looking for an online whiteboard tool and looking at Mural vs Miro. Was there a particular reason that you chose Mural?

A: Tough one as both are great tools we’d recommend! Personal preference is a big factor, though we found Mural easier to teach and get up to speed with. Its definitely worth playing with both and seeing which feels right for you. Depending on your needs, the pricing can end up being quite different too. 

Q: Do you always use the mural board supplement your training session? I can see how it’s useful for the interactive element and in accommodating different learning styles. We’re in the process of moving from face-to-face to delivering virtual training so have lots to learn!

A: We’d say a visual collaboration tool is a must-have when running virtual sessions. Online whiteboards such as Mural are great but there are alternatives such as Miro/Stormboard or even Google Slides. Use whichever you and your audience are most comfortable with and suits the needs of your workshop.

Q: My team and I were thinking about using Mural and this was really convincing, do you have any tips for starting the on-boarding process?

A: Good question! Mural has a bunch of great onboarding materials and their webinars are especially useful, particularly their backstage passes where they show live examples of using the tool. Mural and Miro are both intuitive tools and we’ve found that jumping in and running simple exercises using the tool have enabled us to get up to speed pretty quickly.

Try running a team meeting or short workshop using Mural as a co-creation space and encourage people to experiment with dragging notes and adding to the board.

Q: Can you pre set up post-it notes with say a selection of questions that can then be used to do card sorting? I want to do this with different clients. I’d like to upload my question sets from XL and then allow discussions, sorting voting, and then prioritization.

A: Absolutely! You can drag assets directly into your board or pre-set-up materials for your session with ease – we’d absolutely recommend this! Features like dot voting or the sorting of images/post-it notes is easy in Mural, and you can follow with an impact/effort matrix or similar to prioritize follow-up actions. 

Q: Might it be possible to do a number of breakout rooms in Zoom to support folks working in small groups on an activity simultaneously in Mural?

A: Definitely! One of the major benefits of using an online whiteboard is for participants in Zoom to work collaboratively and co-create in real-time. If you have multiple teams and breakout groups, you can have them create in a single Mural board, or you can create several different boards for each team – especially useful if you want to keep tasks anonymous until later. 

Q: Would you select one person each time to be the scribe on Mural or would you take notes as the facilitator? Or encourage everyone to contribute at the same time?

A: For this session, the idea is for each workshop participant to work collaboratively in the Mura board though while everyone works the facilitator you may tidy up the board as needed. Having an extra helping hand is super useful, especially for remote sessions, though the notes for this session are most often generated by the activities. 

Breaks

Q: How long should breaks be optimally?

A: We usually allow 10-15 mins for a break if we were to break every 90-120 mins. Announcing 10 mins and allowing 15 is a practical tip that can help people feel refreshed and unpressured. 

Q: How many breaks would you try and fit in and for how long? E.g. for a 3-hour online workshop, what would you suggest?

A: We’d go for a minimum of one around halfway through the session. We’d also suggest keeping an eye on the engagement of people, and if needed, apply short breaks when necessary. 

Library methods

Q: All of the activities you are pulling onto your board are from the Session Lab library– are you able to edit the activities with relevant prompts, etc?

A: Yessiree! You can search our library of more than 700 facilitation methods and activities, drag them into your agenda and edit as much as you’d like. You might change timings, add links to outside resources and change prompts, questions or anything else you need.

Templates

Q: Do you have this remote problem-solving agenda as a template that we could use and modify as needed?

A: Absolutely! You can find dozens of templates including this one here. You can copy any of those templates and edit and modify as you see fit.

Exporting 

Q: When exporting the agenda on SessionLab to make it ‘client-facing’, how much branding opportunities are there? Currently we build on Word and personalise the colours to the client, and add their logo alongside ours

A: You can add your own logo which is then shown on the PDF and Word export, but currently no further customisation apart from using your own colour set for the color coded categories. That said, you can export your SessionLab agenda to Word or PDF and customize further from there.

General

Q: Do you ever play music for the group during reflection time or breaks?

A: This depends on the group and the kinds of sessions we’re running. Pleasant, gentle music can be a nice way to create a shared atmosphere or you can play something up-tempo energize a team after a break. Sharing audio through your web conferencing software is generally a great idea, though note that some groups can find this distracting or even off-putting. Definitely gauge the room!

Q: I was wondering if you use a visual timer so everyone can keep track of their own time? 

A: Definitely. Several whiteboard tools (including Mural) have a nice countdown feature that helps with timing for exercises. Even if you’re not using a shared timer, absolutely use one yourself and check how you’re doing against your SessionLab agenda at regular intervals – you may need to adjust later exercise timings as you go.

Q: How can this session work when there needs to be process mapping done during meetings?

A: We’d typically plan the agenda in SessionLab, and then run the session (including the process mapping) in Mural/Miro/any other visual collaboration platform, including Google Slides. Keeping a visual record of your process alongside your agenda is definitely something we’d recommend. 

Q: Which video conference tool do you like best as a facilitator? Zoom, Microsoft Teams, BigMarker?

A: We usually use Zoom as we’ve had the best call quality so far with it, but there are many good alternatives: Google Meet, Whereby, Teams to name just a few. We’d recommend using whatever your team or organisation is most familiar with where possible.

How Might We statements

Q. Do you vote on which “how might we” question to move ahead with? Or do you just go with the top question?

A: After turning your problem into How Might We statements, then have a final round of voting to choose the How Might We you wish to move ahead with. 

Lightning Demos

Q: For the lightning demo, did you create those boxes and ask people to populate them with their ideas?  Just trying to understand exactly how it works.

A: During the Lightning Demo phase, each participant would start with a blank sheet, and participants would populate this with their idea/inspiration based on their research. Showing an example with the relevant sections filled in is also a good idea if your participants are unfamiliar with the technique. 

Impact/Effort matrix

Q: On the Impact/Effort matrix, are you placing based on the action steps of the experiment or the “experiments” that have been pitched?

A: The full experiments, though the action steps will absolutely factor into the decision of where to place them on the matrix!

Co-facilitation

Q: Do you co-facilitate? Or have you managed to find a way facilitate virtually on your own? Seems to be more to juggle than face to face?

A: Either option can work, though we’d highly recommend co-facilitating online sessions where possible. This might mean two people running separate parts of the agenda, or simply having another person to help facilitate exercises or handle technical items. We’ve found having one person in charge of leading the session while having another perform administrative tasks and ensuring the activities run smoothly is a great way of keeping online sessions running smoothly.

We are in a transition where leaders have canceled all their in-person events (due to coronavirus) and don’t yet know what their teams need. Many institutions have frozen spending and so there is a lot of unknown as to what my client landscape will look like as we go forward. 95% of my existing contracts were canceled so there’s a lot of transition and adaptation going on.

It’s no secret that the current global crisis is affecting the world of facilitation. Organizations are freezing budgets, canceling live meetings, and figuring out how to restructure their businesses for remote working environments.

Facilitators are having to adapt too. Transitioning from running live workshops to holding online sessions is a challenge. Redesigning agendas to work in an online environment and keeping participants engaged takes a renewed effort and the adaptation of even the most basic facilitation skills.

At SessionLab, we wanted to understand the impact of the current pandemic situation on facilitators and see how they’re adapting. We held a short survey and invited our users and facilitators to contribute their insight and experiences. We received 140 responses and have collected what we’ve learned below.

The results show some common challenges and trends, highlights some of the most popular online tools currently used for remote sessions, and also points to a number of best practices that facilitators might learn from moving forward.

By pulling this information together, we hoped to first understand the nature of problems facilitators are facing so we can help, and secondly, we hope to help other facilitators too!

Let’s dig in! 

• How has the current pandemic impacted facilitators?
• What tools are facilitators using to run online workshops?
  
  • Video conferencing tools
  • Online whiteboards
  • Engagement tools
• What challenges are facilitators facing?
  
  • Engagement and interactivity
  • Keeping the human factor
  • Adapting existing content
  • Finding the right tools
  • Client confidence and cancellations
  • Resources and remote-friendly exercises

How has the current pandemic impacted facilitators?

At SessionLab, we care about helping facilitators and organizations design and run better workshops, whatever the format.

To better understand the impact of COVID-19, we started by asking respondents how their workload and working format has been affected. The results here paint an interesting picture.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of our respondents are moving their online sessions online. 66.9% of facilitators who answered our survey are running all of their sessions online, while a whopping 81% of respondents were transferring at least half of their sessions online. 

10% of facilitators expected to run none of their sessions online this month. For those users, there was some concern over client cancellations and a lack of client confidence in transitioning certain sessions online.

Some users talked about the current uncertainty meaning that clients did not have an appetite or budget for facilitated workshops, or that events had simply been canceled as businesses entered crisis mode. This is likely to be a fluid situation as organizations find their way through the current crisis and reposition themselves ahead of running external workshops.

Beyond the obvious challenges of transitioning to this new online environment, facilitators need to consider the changing needs of their clients and how to position themselves as a result. 

Facilitated workshops always have value, though their format, focus, or purpose may need to change to be valuable for organizations watching their budgets.

Unsurprisingly, the number of sessions facilitators are running has decreased. Just over 61% of facilitators report they are running fewer sessions than previously.

Interestingly, 29% of facilitators report an increase in the number of sessions they are running. Those respondents who reported an increase in sessions tended to show a greater knowledge of online tools and of the unique challenges and considerations of remote facilitation.

It’s difficult to gain any concrete takeaways from this data alone: there are many factors that could affect the number of sessions held which were not accounted for in this survey.

That said, it appears that knowing your tools, learning about the unique challenges of remote facilitation, and jumping in feet first is a solid approach to gaining new clients or convincing your existing clients to try remote workshops. 

Comparing the numbers of sessions directly shows again that a large number of respondents have seen a decrease in workshop numbers. Interestingly, those few respondents running more than fifteen sessions a month did not see their numbers decrease.

Those respondents that reported a large increase or a large number of sessions generally had some commonalities. Chief among these was the use and integration of online tools businesswide, and a pro-active approach in educating and reaching out to clients new and old.

Online collaboration tools were mentioned in greater numbers by these participants. They also tended to work with teams where online tools and processes were more deeply ingrained with the organization. 

Encouraging the use of online tools and helping clients transition to working in an online environment is worthwhile and appears to be part of the skillset of these high performing facilitators.

For those facilitators out there facing a lack of client work, helping organizations with their general transition to online working and helping to facilitate organizational change, use online tools, and structure remote work etc, might be the way to go.

Transitioning to online workshops?

What tools are facilitators using to run online workshops?

One of the first challenges to overcome when transitioning to online facilitation is choosing the right tools. There are a huge number of tools available for every aspect of running an online workshop, and finding those that are right for both you and your client can be overwhelming.

In this section of the survey, we asked facilitators what tools they were using and to recommend their favorites. We’ve broken these results down by the kind of tool to gain some insight into which are the most popular tools used by facilitators. Hopefully, this will give you some insight into what’s being used by facilitators and how you might use those tools too!

We use Zoom. It’s good for what it is. Breakout rooms are commonly mentioned in survey results as being the best part of training online.

Survey respondent

When we asked our respondents what tools they used, we found that the majority used more than a single tool – 65.4% of respondents use two or more tools when facilitating online and just over 25% of participants use four or more tools as part of their process.

It’s worth noting that these tools often include a mix of video conferencing tools, asynchronous collaboration platforms, online whiteboards, and engagement tools.

We also heard from many facilitators that used different tools with different clients based on their needs: it’s worth considering having a toolkit that works for power users and less tech-savvy clients.

Video conferencing tools

Of all those users who mentioned a video conferencing tool, Zoom was the clear frontrunner, with 67% of participants mentioning Zoom as their video conferencing tool of choice.

The primary reasons cited for using Zoom included:

• Zoom’s breakout sessions – a very useful feature for many workshops and meetings
• User familiarity
• Low barrier to entry

It’s also worth noting that the majority of folks who mentioned using Zoom used it alongside other tools such as online whiteboards and engagement tools. Using Zoom (or any video conferencing tool) alone does not appear to be enough for most facilitators and it’s worth considering how your toolset might work together when selecting which to go for.

We use Zoom, Miro/Mural and Mentimeter during sessions, and then Slack and Google Drive for asynchronous communication afterwards.

Survey respondent

The next most popular video conferencing applications included Microsoft Teams (10.9%), Google Hangouts (5.1%), and Skype (5.1%). The primary reasons cited for using these tools included user familiarity and existing use of Microsoft or Google’s suite of tools.  People like what they’re used to and in difficult times, not having to learn a whole new toolset can make online facilitation a little easier.

Interestingly, a number of participants mentioned using multiple video conferencing tools and shifting based on their client’s preference. While this presents its own challenge for the facilitator, there is value in using whatever the client and their team are most familiar with.

Remember that good facilitation should always be in service of the group: this idea extends to choosing tools too!

We use Zoom/Whereby plus Stormboard for low entrance barrier. Sharepoint with Microsoft Teams (or Zoom/Whereby) for sessions where we have participants that work in security-heavy ICT infrastructures.

Survey respondent

Here’s a complete list of all the video conference tools mentioned in our survey alongside the percentage of participants who used them.

Online whiteboards

Online whiteboards are great tools for remote facilitators: allowing real time visual collaboration for distributed teams that can help engage and excite participants.

While there are clear frontrunners when looking at this survey data, there are a greater range of options present here. Mural takes the lion’s share of the results, with 39% of participants choosing their tool as their online whiteboard of choice.

Miro comes in second place with 24.6%. Both tools are great and share many of the same features. The general consensus is that Mural is a little more user friendly and easier to upskill clients with. From playing around with both tools, we love them both, though find the biggest consideration comes down to pricing based on your case use.

Padlet comes in third with 9.8% of the vote. It’s a great tool that excels at creating asynchronous learning materials: it integrates easily with Google Classroom and other teaching platforms. If you’re creating training to be completed asynchronously or work in education, Padlet is a great platform to check out.

Google’s Jamboard is a popular choice for those already using Google Suite and on a budget. While not as fully featured as some of the other choices here, it is an easy to learn tool that might be fit for your purposes.

Figma is another tool mentioned by a few users that excels for certain case uses. Primarily a design tool, Figma can be used as a place to share and iterate on design in real-time. Being able to collaborate on advanced designs in one tool is potentially a huge boon to remote designers! 

When it came to choosing an online whiteboard, facilitators cited a number of items factored into their decision:

• Baked-in interactive features such as polling, voting, and instant feedback
• Ease of use (particularly for non-tech savvy clients) 
• Reusability of content (templates etc) 
• Stability of platform

As we’ve seen here, choosing the right online whiteboard likely comes down to your case use and client base. While Mural or Miro might be the best general purpose whiteboards, there are alternatives that could be better for specific case uses. Our advice is to try a few, talk to your fellow facilitators and land on one that hits that sweet spot for you and your clients. 

Engagement tools

Keeping participants engaged and making sessions interactive was one of the greatest challenges cited by respondents to our surveys. Making workshops interactive and experiential in a remote setting is challenging, and finding exercises and tools that can help you achieve this online is a concern for many.

While some online whiteboards and video conferencing software have some additional engagement features, a fully-featured engagement tool such as those seen here can be a key ingredient of a successful online workshop!

Mentimeter is one of the standout tools used by facilitators to engage online participants, with 50% of respondents who mentioned a standalone engagement tool citing this one. With features including real-time polling, quizzes and presentations, Mentimeter covers a lot of bases in one tool.

Kahoot comes in second with 18.8% – it’s a great engagement tool with a focus on gamification and e-learning. With a library of public games and working examples, it’s a great tool for getting started swiftly and effectively.  

While most of these tools offer similar features, they each have a target niche and depending on your needs, you may find one of them stands out for you. We’d recommend taking a look at each – whichever you choose, there is a lot of value in using an engagement tool to make your sessions more interactive.

What challenges are facilitators facing? 

We asked participants in our survey to outline the challenges they were facing. We all know that the current crisis is forcing facilitators to rethink their approach to everything from workshop design and choice of activities all the way through to etiquette and delivery.

Our respondents noted several challenges which came up time and time again. Here, we’ll outline the biggest challenges facilitators are facing at present.  

A. Finding the right mix of tools to be able to use workshop methods such as whiteboards, sticky notes, video feeds, without running into huge costs. And it wouldn’t hurt if these tools played together well. Impossible, I guess.

B. Getting participants into a workshop feel, such as “this is a protected room.”

C. Planning for technical difficulties.

D. Netiquette and individual discipline for online workshops (e.g. switch your cam on, but switch your mic off unless you are talking, don’t interrupt, don’t keep talking for too long).

E. Finally, the thought that maybe my trusted and reliable method mix for in-person workshops might need a completely new approach for online workshops.

Survey respondent on the challenges they face

Engagement & Interactivity

The most common challenge noted by facilitators was around engaging participants and making their sessions interactive.

Getting participants actively involved in a session is a concern when leading workshops in any session, though this can be more difficult in an online session where fatigue sets in faster and it’s more difficult to deliver varied and engaging activities. 

Experiential learning was another highly noted challenge – figuring out how to get participants to use what they’ve been taught and learn through experience in a remote setting was a concern of many facilitators.

Interactivity is another piece of the puzzle: the format requires some rethinking in order to effectively include interactive elements. What might have worked in a big conference room with everyone present may simply result in frustration in an online setting.

A key takeaway here is that with the right design, delivery and tools, engagement and interaction are possible in an online environment. It’s not enough to assume what works in a live workshop will work remotely: facilitators need to adapt their sessions and exercises to an online setting.

Design with the limits and opportunities of remote workshops in mind. This likely means reducing the length of sessions, incorporating the use of collaboration and engagement tools, and finding remote friendly exercises to put in your agenda. 

Remember that engagement and interactivity can be achieved remotely: you just need to tailor your approach and design around the challenges. Tools, of course, are a large part of this. Using real-time co-creation in an online whiteboard is a great start, but try going further with some of the engagement tools listed above.

Breakout groups are also useful in recreating the engagement and interactivity of a live workshop. In small breakout sessions, participants have the opportunity to engage more fully in a task and speak freely without fear of major crosstalk issues. 

Keeping the human factor 

Not everything works online – I miss the people

Survey respondent

Human connection and engagement are two of the most vital ingredients of a successful workshop or meeting. While live workshops are fantastic at buiding connections, this can be more difficult to achieve remotely. 

Helping participants to connect, understand one another and grow together was another key concern our survey participants had. A number of respondents cited personal connections and human contact as part of what made workshops effective, and achieving those things in an online setting was a key challenge for them.

Using breakout sessions where smaller groups of people can engage meaningfully as part of a larger session can really help foster this sense of connection. 

Remote-friendly games and activities can also be a vital part of creating an atmosphere conducive to connection. Remember that for many remote workers, an online workshop or meeting might be the only real time visual connection they have with their colleagues. Use the opportunity for team building and try to create space for moments of fun in your agenda. 

Adapting existing content

Switching to remote: Finding formats that make sense for learning and paying the bills at the same time.

Survey respondent on the challenges they face

Adapting existing content to online workshops was another key challenge for those who responded to our survey. Many facilitators have a toolbox of methods, exercises and formats they know works for them and can be reused and adapted for any of their clients. 

Redesigning or adapting this existing content for online workshops isn’t straightforward, and some of those tried and tested facilitation techniques require substantial redesign or simply won’t work online. 

This process of redesign is a challenge for most facilitators and their clients. Talking to your clients and your fellow facilitators has never been more important. We’re all collectively discovering what works and what doesn’t and being open can really help everyone grow and achieve their goals.

We’d also say that the process of redesigning existing content should take a back to basics approach. What are you trying to achieve in each step of your workshop process and what is the easiest and most effective way you can make that happen under present circumstances?

Your process should be designed with your participants and the set-up of your workshop in mind. Trying to adapt live workshop content for a remote setting without accounting for these things is unlikely to be as effective as rebuilding for all the particulars of the online environment

Redesigning everything so it still feels interactive, inclusive and has the same atmosphere as with face to face sessions.

Survey respondent on the challenges they face

Another key aspect of this adaptation process is learning which live processes can be recreated with tools and then, finding what tools can effectively recreate those workshop staples. 

Creating a collaborative space where participants can intuitively and easily work together should be your first port of call when adapting your workshop to the remote setting.

In a live workshop, participants have personal table space in which to work, as well as communal wall space to post artifacts and reflect. They often have small group discussions or pair work, as well as full group plenaries. Consider how you can recreate these ways of working online. 

Putting everyone in a single large group for unstructured discussion isn’t how facilitation is done in live settings, nor should it be that way things are done online.  

Finding the right tools

Google tools, Zoom, Slido, Mural, Mentimeter… too many to be honest!

Survey respondent

A number of participants noted challenges around selecting the right tools. Depending on case use or client base, finding tools that are easy to learn or are fit for all purposes is a struggle for many facilitators.

Selecting the right tool is heavily dependent on the needs of your clients and the format of the workshop. It’s a balance between ease of use and features you may need to encourage collaboration and engagement.

Remember that any tools you use should be in service of the group: if a tool is difficult to learn or you only use 10% of it’s feature set, you may want to rethink using it.

Respondents also noted that many people are facing tool overload: using what every client is familiar with is also a viable strategy, though it does increase your own workload.

Finding the right tools is likely to require some testing, liaising with clients and other facilitators and finding a toolset that works for you. The list of tools above is a great place to start.

Our advice is to keep things simple where you can and if you have to use more complex tools, limit their number. Using a video conferencing tool everyone is familiar with like Zoom means that you can avoid friction on that front, while allocating resources for them to learn an online whiteboard such as Mural.

Need more advice, check out our post on free online tools for some examples of great tool sets for your online workshops. 

Client confidence in online processes and cancellations 

Getting new business. Helping potential clients to realize they can still achieve the same results online. They are running scared, even though they still have money to spend and outcomes to achieve.

Survey respondent on the challenges they face

Remote facilitation can be as effective as live facilitation, though as a still developing field, it has its challenges and a teething period to go through. Many respondents noted difficulty when it came to keeping clients invested in workshops, in proving the value of online sessions and in finding new clients in these difficult times.

One user noted that: “We are in a transition where leaders have cancelled all their in-person events and don’t yet know what their teams need.”

One takeaway here is that the facilitator’s role is now to help educate clients in why remote facilitation and online workshops are valuable and how they can be used effectively. There are opportunities for facilitators who adapt well, and taking advantage of these opportunities while improving client confidence in an online process is also something to think about.

The overload of information, online courses, e-books; hard to ‘compete’. Pricing – most courses online are now for free; how to price?

Survey respondent on the challenges they face

Facilitators have always needed to demonstrate the value of their work, though this is perhaps even more important now. One participant noted that one of their biggest challenges was, “Helping potential clients to realise they can still achieve the same results online.” 

Be proactive and show how well facilitated sessions are still important in times of crisis and change. Share you online workshop agendas early and demonstrate how much organisations can still achieve online. Periods of upheaval often require organisational change and the facilitation and management of that change is somewhere facilitators can provide value to organisations that may have put a hold on other kinds of workshops.

Resources & remote-friendly exercises  

How do you translate methods and tools to an online format? How do you convince people that they need to continue their sessions?

Survey respondent on the challenges they face

Finding exercises and activities suitable for engaging an online audience was another common concern faced by our respondents. Not every exercise works in a remote setting and activities which require movement, certain kinds of communication or large spaces are simply not viable when facilitating over Zoom. 

Other activities can theoretically be run online, though they simply aren’t as effective and require a rethink in order to be viable. Online energizers and games that are as engaging as real-life activities was a common request and trying to find a varied set of exercises for online meetings is a continuing challenge for many. 

Thankfully, this challenge is a little easier to solve. We’ve added remote-friendly methods to our library of techniques and activities and compiled a list of the best online energizers too!

Think of this transition period as an opportunity and experimentation. There’s going to be an element of trying out techniques, tools and exercises and seeing what works. Share with your fellow facilitators, engage with the community and don’t be afraid to try new things. 

Honestly, we’ve adapted pretty well. Internal teams are LOVING SessionLab to stay organized and readjust times, etc.

Survey respondent

Wrap up

As we’ve seen above, the effect of COVID-19 on the world of facilitation cannot be underestimated. Facilitators and organizations are having to rethink how to create space for discussion and problem solving in a remote setting.

While the challenges are many, there are also opportunities for those facilitators who can adapt and use the best of what online tools have to offer. Hopefully, the above data can help reduce any concerns you have and make you feel a little less alone while also giving you some practical insight into what facilitators are doing to respond to these challenges. 

Looking for more advice on how to be an effective online facilitator? Check out our resource centre for remote facilitation for tips, advice and remote workshop templates.

Have anything you’d like to add or was there something we missed? Get in touch in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!