Fresh off the back of producing the annual townhall for a global client, here is an eight-ball 🎱 of tips to help make your next townhall event a success.

1. Make sure your strategy is well-defined

This is probably an article all in itself, but you really need to have your strategy clear and in place at all times, and especially when you speak to your staff — no matter what the context.

To save you waiting for the piece on strategy, take a look at our white paper on the same subject.

And here are three provocations from me:

• “We want to grow” is not a strategy.

• The strategy should be in in service of your company’s vision and purpose.

• When helping businesses with their strategy, we like to aim for three pillars or priorities. Each pillar will have some enablers, which are the main levers you pull to achieve those priorities. In order to understand how effective you are at pulling those levers, each enabler will have at least one measurement which you should track.

2. Start from the end: What’s the core message?

Before you start any further planning, you should identify the single core message you want your audience to take away from the event.

Don’t be tempted to have more than one core message — because as soon as you go past one you dramatically reduce the chances that your audience will remember them.

The fact is that your own focus will directly sharpen your colleagues’ focus.

Conversely, if you try to expect colleagues to focus on too many things at the same time, by definition they’re likely to be unable to focus on any of them at all.

3. Craft a clear narrative arc

Generally speaking, I think colleagues enjoy the opportunity which townhalls offer to hear from the top leadership about the plans for the company they work for and to put questions to them.

Having said that they are still giving up a chunk of their day away from their desk to listen to you, so you should at least make it as engaging as you can, so your townhall event should have a clear narrative arc: this is the structure which makes sure the elements in your townhall running order hang together to communicate the core message.

Rather than being just an endless list of company updates, the items you cover in your townhall will be so much more memorable when they don’t just sit along the narrative arc but actually help it along.

So here’s an example of a narrative arc for a townhall:

• The CEO setting out her vision for the next 10 years of the business.

• To fully understand where you’re going a reflection on where you’ve come from i.e. the last 10 years of the business

• What you’re going to have to do differently to get where you’re wanting to go. What do you expect from colleagues to get there. Perhaps hearing from leaders in various parts of the business to illustrate what this means for different areas of the business.

• Taking questions from the audience

4. Your agenda is not a Christmas turkey — don’t overstuff it.

It’s tempting to pack your agenda with lots of information and updates, but this can be counterproductive. Overloading your audience with too much content can dilute your core message.

It’s valuable to think of your townhall like a TV broadcast. Even if it’s recorded, a viewer will not pore over every second of detail.

Imagine if you had just watched a 60-minute documentary and your friend asked you to summarise it. You can only draw on what has stuck in your head. So putting it bluntly, make sure stuff sticks in the heads of your colleagues.

5. Reinforce your messages

Repetition is key to retention. Repeat your key messages several times throughout the event. Use different formats and contexts to reinforce the same points. It’s often said that just when you are getting bored of repeating a message, that’s when people are starting to listen.

This can lead to some interesting moments in your planning meetings.

Because your your townhall team is closest to the content and its core message, it can often feel strange to them to see such a high-level of repetition in it. It can be tempting to reduce this repetition, but you have to remember your audience will be hearing it all for the first time at the townhall.

6. Make it interactive

Engage your audience by incorporating interactive tools like Slido or Pigeonhole. These platforms allow participants to ask questions, share their views, and get involved in real-time.

Embrace challenging questions because they show you are open to dialogue and confident in addressing concerns.

For my client’s townhall, we launched the Slido Q&A a couple of weeks in advance to allow colleagues to post their questions. It also gives you an opportunity to see the sort of topics they are interested in and to consider how you’re going to respond to those questions.

There is often of discussion about whether you allow anonymous questions or insist on people publishing their names. While leaders tend not to like anonymous contributions, there are at least two reasons why someone might want to ask a question anonymously the first is because it’s a tricky subject which they’d rather not be publicly identified with; the second is that they may not be a culture of openness, transparency or bravery in the organisation.

7. Keep your visuals simple

There’s an another whole separate piece on slides. Death by PowerPoint is a scourge to be avoided at any time, but more so than at an event like a townhall.

Look at TED talks — not a bullet point in sight! Instead, visuals when they actually help, rather than by default.

A townhall doesn’t have to contain a presentation in the Powerpoint sense at all. The best TED speakers are often ones who don’t even use a single slide. I am also a fan of well-choreographed panel discussions, which could use a visual aid to illustrate a particular point.

Taking you back once more to my old life as a TV producer I always used to think that when creating on-screen graphics, you have to assume that whoever is watching is watching on a tiny black-and-white TV in the kitchen while cooking supper so your slides need to be more like advertising billboards when it comes to simplicity.

8. Rehearse, but stay flexible

Preparation is crucial, so rehearse your presentation multiple times.

The first rehearsal is always the worst! You’ll want to stop, but press on. While it’s the worst it’s also the most impactful, so you just have to do it — you can’t have a good second rehearsal without a rubbish first one! Trust the process.

However, don’t over-rehearse to the point of sounding robotic. You want to come across as prepared yet natural. Being well-prepared also means being ready to adapt if something doesn’t go according to plan. Sometimes it’s more authentic to hear from someone who isn’t polished to within an inch of their life. We all like to see our great leaders are also human!

So there you have it — do share your townhall experiences, or ask me any questions you might have.