Tips on virtual/IRL hybrid meetings by the Sierra Club
Created by Mary Alice Crim, Distributed Organizing Associate Director at the Sierra Club.
In person meetings, all virtual meetings and hybrid virtual/in person meetings are similar, and yet facilitation and participation in each type of meeting is also different and requires some specific skills and planning.
The tips below are offered by the Sierra Club distributed organizing team based on our experience running staff and volunteer organizing meetings. Our remote staff team depends on virtual and hybrid meetings to do our work, build relationships and build power. We originally put this document together as a resource for our team. As many of us move to shift our meetings to the virtual space we know people are asking for support and resources. We received a lot of questions about running virtual meetings, so our Distributed Organizing Associate Director Mary Alice Crim quickly moved to build out the resources list and share it so others can benefit from our knowledge and skills.
Our distributed organizers have collective experience working with hundreds of thousands of volunteers simultaneously to win campaign and policy victories that build our collective power and change people’s lives. Digital tools and infrastructure such as virtual meetings are essential to our ability to connect and communicate across space and time with our volunteers and support their leadership development. This allows us to work at a large scale - a scale large enough to run campaigns and projects that are big enough to confront the current challenges our world is facing.
Distributed organizing projects look different in different places and on different campaigns. But generally speaking we activate people in multiple locations across geographic boundaries. Typically volunteers work in groups and teams that move with unity and autonomy. The volunteers coordinate with a central team that sets story, strategy and structure. We rely on digital tools. We are all about working at scale, building power and winning real and concrete improvements to people’s lives. (Shout out to our friends at Blueprints for Change who influenced this description.) Check out this background document about what distributed organizing is.
These tips are not static - the tips are designed to travel and designed to iterate and improve based on our collective experience running all virtual and hybrid meetings. When you share this resource with others please credit the distributed organizing team at Sierra Club. Please drop comments with things that we should add or edit.