Your life experiences, education, and abilities have all led you to this decision. You are ready to share your expertise with others, and presenting a workshop is the perfect choice to do so. Now, the question is how to plan a workshop that is effective for the participants, engaging, and runs smoothly.
A workshop allows you to give your attendees a life-changing, or profoundly educational experience. Here, you’ll find the information you need to bring your passion to life for your participants effectively. In doing so, you may also create a new business opportunity for yourself.
First, we’ll cover the basics about workshops, then mistakes that could hold you back from succeeding. Finally, we’ll get to exactly what you need to consider to plan your first one and then roll naturally into another should you wish.
What is a Workshop?
A workshop is a brief, intimate event that rewards participants with a skill or lesson that will solve a problem for them. Each participant should feel like they had one-on-one time with the presenter when they leave. They should also feel they were active as part of that group.
They are useful to the people who attend, enriching them in some way. People who choose to participate in a workshop feel that there is something in their life they could do better, or have a problem they are trying to solve.
However, they do not want to be a passive bystander in the learning process.
Some general ideas to remember about workshops:
- Keep it small. You don’t want to exceed 15 people, or you can’t give them all personal attention.
- Keep it short and self-contained. A few hours up to two days is standard.
- Participation is key. Events are highly interactive and engaging.
- They should be led by an expert in a topic.
- They’re fun! Think informal, exciting, and interactive.
With all that, it seems like a no brainer that many people enjoy workshops. You may be wondering why you should choose this form of communication to reach your target audience. Wouldn’t a presentation work as well?
Why Should You Host a Workshop Instead of a Presentation?
Unlike a presentation or conference, a workshop should be interactive, at least in part. You aren’t merely shoving information at people, while their minds wander to what they want to cook for supper that evening. You are leading them through the steps to absorb and internalize it.
As Greg J. McInerny puts it:
“At workshops, you are a participant in the whole event, and you can make many direct contributions to its goals. In contrast, at conferences, the aim is for a broad informational in which you are part of the audience and contribute comparatively little content.”
Whatever information you are trying to teach your participants, a small group that allows people to interact and be engaged is the right way to go.
Workshops are also short. You want to keep it down in terms of how long each session lasts, and how many you will have. Most people are very busy, and they are looking for the best ways to well-spend the small amount of time they have.
Unlike a class that could take several weeks, these small gatherings teach them what they want to know with a modest investment of time. Whatever they need to get from the workshop is what you need to offer them. That is your job, to find a topic that fits people’s needs and filling them.
Your topic, then, dictates the planning of your event. Before we get to how to find that topic, let’s talk a little bit about branding and who you are. Because when you are presenting a workshop, you need to be able to frame yourself as expert enough to be a reasonable presenter.
Branding: Who Are You Anyway?
Do you have an established business or clients? Do you already have a brand that you want to leverage while helping your prospective attendees? If the answer to either of those questions was yes, you probably already have an idea for a topic.
If you don’t, you will want to do some deep dives into personal branding, to inform your decision on which direction you’ll take your workshop. Are you planning to offer a single event, or is it your dream to make this your business? Either way, there are some things to think about first.
When in the pre-planning phase of your workshop creation process, you need to consider what well of experience you have to draw from, and how that can help you to expand on your personal brand. Make sure that you stick to your wheelhouse, but don’t be afraid to expand your horizons.
That’s because when it comes to planning your event, your expertise is an excellent place to start. However, it is a mistake to end there. We’ll get back to this topic below.
It’s one of many mistakes people make; here are a few more of them.
The 5 Biggest Mistakes Workshop Presenters Make
- Not leaving themself enough time for planning
- Giving a lecture instead of a workshop
- Not rehearsing the content well before the event
- Forgetting the necessary equipment to present your topic
- Not focusing on your audience at every step when planning
Not Enough Time for Planning
When are you planning on having this workshop? In a week, in a month? How long do you have to plan it out if you are going to have the workshop then?
Many presenters make the mistake of only giving themselves a short window to plan their first workshop. You want to give yourself at least two months for your first event. That gives you time to plan it, book a location, build your content, and then market it to your target audience.
You are busy, and so is everyone else. So be careful not to underestimate the time that you will need to prepare well. Putting a few more weeks into your preparation pays dividends if you use them well.
The difference between presenting a workshop that people are telling their friends about happily — and one they are trashing all over social media — can be as simple as poor time management in the planning steps.
You want to start advertising about a month before your event, and remember to offer “early bird specials.” They motivate people to sign up early but don’t expect to sell out your first go-round. You will build a rapport with people over time that will make your events more sought out.
Giving a Lecture
You wrote out six pages of information to frame your 3-hour workshop and built a 2.5-hour slide show. Then you printed a workbook from your slides for participants to take notes on. Now, you are ready to bore them to death.
Neuroscience has backed up the idea that your standard 18-minute TED talk is about as far as you should push people’s attention span for listening to and retaining information. After that, they start losing focus, and bored brains like to hop all over the place.
People go to workshops because they are both educational and fun. Because learning is hands-on, and presenters are there to make their life better in some way. They do not go to be talked at, sit still for a few hours, and stare at a slideshow.
Not Rehearsing Your Content
Even if you are a naturally gifted presenter with a high emotional intelligence level, you should rehearse prepared materials. If you do not, you are going to stumble, at least. At worst, you’ll find yourself figuratively falling directly on your face and leaving your attendees with a poor impression of you.
Sure, you don’t want to come across as canned. You aren’t trying to perform a Broadway play, perfectly replicate each time. However, as T.J. Walker wrote for Forbes, not rehearsing is like sending a first draft letter out to your entire business community. You’d never do that.
He suggests spending time on practice, so much that it gets annoying and repetitive. The biggest tip here is that you should practice in front of a camera, then watch yourself. Fix what you notice needs fixing in your layout, then, do it again and again.
Forgetting Necessary Equipment
Are you going to use a projector? How about a laptop, smartphone, or sound system? While practicing, you should use all of the props, tech, and workbooks that you intend to use the day of your event. The cords you need and pieces that are essential for everything to display right will become evident.
Make a list of them, after the practice that you are happy with, and use that list to pack the day of the workshop. Getting to your location just to discover that you needed a power strip to run everything and don’t have it won’t happen if you follow this simple step.
Not Focusing on Your Audience
You need to know about you and your brand to decide what you can present as an authority. However, a successful workshop needs to bring value to the attendee. Remember, we’re going to enrich their life, so to do that, you must focus first on them when choosing a topic.
Choosing your topic means thinking, not about yourself, but about what your target audience needs to know. It is tempting to make a list of things you are good at, then choose to do your workshop on that.
Tempting, but a recipe to make your first workshop your last. Because people come to these small events to better themselves, you are in a position to serve their needs. To do so, you have to begin planning it from the perspective of what you can do for them, not only what you can do well.
Mistakes happen to us all. Now that we’ve addressed some of the most common mistakes let’s get to how to turn your dream workshop into a reality.
How to Plan Your Workshop
We’ve addressed a lot of the forethought that goes into the planning process. Now, we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of how to pull it all together.
Choose a Topic
Picking a topic may seem simple, but it’s not. Remember that you need to come from a place of deep understanding of your subject. You are an expert on what you are teaching, and that is why people will attend your workshop.
However, you’re focusing inward. Focus out, instead, on your prospective clients.
What problem, discomfort, need, or emptiness are you going to alleviate for them using your expertise? Your workshop topic should relieve a pain point for them, whether it is how to use your Chakras for personal growth, or planning one’s estate.
When you are thinking about your workshop topic, remember, it’s your first one. Chances are, you aren’t planning on it being your last. Hence, make sure that what you identify as your topic is something that you can naturally expand on when offering your next workshop.
Planning a second is easier since you have already solved a problem for people, which usually reveals a second, logically following problem. We’re going to dig into that more below.
Who is Your Target Audience?
It’s finally time to choose your target audience, who are you going to help. You may want to generalize, but you need to be specific. Choose one type of person you can help, and tailor your event only to them. That type of person, and only them, is your target audience.
You need to understand your audience so that you can meet their needs. One of those needs is to make your event financially feasible for them to attend. Another is making it convenient enough for that to matter.
You need to choose the type of person you can help specifically. If you try to make your workshop “one-size-fits-all,” you will find that it fits no one at all.
That specific audience will dictate a lot of things, including your choice of location.
Where and When, and How Long?
Now you know what and who, you need to find a location. You want to find a venue that has a large enough room for all of your participants but isn’t so big they feel intimidated by the space.
You need to make sure that there is sufficient space for activities and parking for guests. But that’s not all.
Thinking about your target audience, you can go one of two ways. You can either look for a location that feels like “getting away,” or one that feels easy for them to attend because it’s near somewhere they go anyway.
Both are acceptable choices, depending on your topic and target audience.
Consider the location from the point of view of an attendee. Choose a place that will be convenient for them. You don’t want massive numbers of stairs or rough terrain if you are serving older people who may have trouble navigating them.
You also don’t want to stuff a bunch of rowdy college students in a retirement home’s “rec room.”
Not only would both of those locations be poor choices for the audience mentioned, but they’d also make people uncomfortable from the get-go.
Is your audience looking for an escape? Are they looking for something convenient while dealing with a hectic schedule? Are they physically active, young, elderly, city-types, or outdoors people? Environment and ambiance can have a marked effect on people, so keep them at the center of your choice.
The factor that may be more important than anything other than your audience’s comfort is cost. If you are not well established, especially, choosing an exotic-type locale or high-dollar venue may run up the price of attendance beyond what the market will bear.
Once you have chosen a venue, you need to know how far you need to book it in advance of your event. Venuebook.com recommends booking at least three weeks in advance. However, highly sought after spaces may need to be booked even further out.
Top considerations for choosing a venue:
- Cost
- Location
- Convenience or uniqueness
- Booking time
- Size
- Amenities
- Parking
- Seating
- Planned activities
Location can have a marked effect on how a business event plays out, with poor choices often having negative consequences. If you choose a place that offers no parking and has no public transit, people will be less likely to come.
Now that you have chosen and booked a location, it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty of planning how you will teach your audience about the topic.
Preparing to Teach
You are about to become a teacher. We’ve discussed how workshops offer attendees something that they need to address a problem that they have. You’ve identified that problem, and the solution, all that’s left is educating them.
It may be tempting to throw 25 in-depth lessons that “really matter” to your audience. That’s a mistake.
Instead, choose a few points you want to share or build on with your audience. Focusing on three or four primary goals, you can create your entire program that delivers what they need.
When you present information in exciting ways, punctuated with rest periods and interactive activities, they will feel more involved in learning. That is the point, to engage them so that what you have to offer is absorbed. Then, they are educated or enlightened, and you have created a relationship with them, which may lead to them returning for your next workshop.
Set up your lessons to build a connection. Start with something that makes participants interact, breaking the ice.
You want to have portions of this that are “hands on,” whether those be a trust exercise, a group project, or teaching them to create what you are learning by doing it with them. If you include a workbook with your materials, it can be a great way to incorporate your branding into the event.
People take the workbook home, and then they have your information for when they are talking to their neighbor about the workshop.
Never Forget: Who You are Teaching Matters
Some other considerations come right back to who you are trying to draw to your events. How you construct your workshop means considering how to speak with attendees.
Once again, consider your audience. Are they coworkers, or a team, so already have camaraderie? Are you teaching moms of preschoolers how to make money on the side? Do they have similar educational backgrounds? Age is essential in audience targeting too.
Consider sending a questionnaire to people who will be attending your event. Ask them a little about themselves and what they hope to gain from the experience. You can use that information to construct your presentation better.
That’s because you need to use relevant examples and language.
You would not use Post Malone’s life story as an inspiration to a group of grandmas whose favorite music is crooned by Frank Sinatra. Similarly, you wouldn’t use the same words with a group of 19-year-olds as you would retirees.
Seriously, phrases as simple as “a whole meal” and “doing the most” have different meanings when crossing generational lines.
Finishing Your Workshop
Remember that workbook we mentioned? Making the last page an exit questionnaire is a great idea. You want to hear from people about what they liked and did not like about the event while it is still fresh in their minds.
Make sure to leave them anonymous; people are more honest then.
Your brief list of questions should include questions that ask them about their favorite part. But, you should also ask them to give you ideas of what they feel you didn’t cover or could have done better.
From there, ask them something else. What questions do you have now, which you may not have had before the workshop? That question may help you to find the next logical problem your target audience is going to face. That info may help you book clients for your next one.
Above all, though, this realistic feedback about your teaching style, plan, and activities gives you what you need to reflect on the event from their perspective.
Time to Reflect
Did you mess up? Chances are, at least one thing went wrong. If only one thing did, congratulate yourself, that’s some sound first time planning!
You have a stack of feedback and your own impressions to look at studying.
While reading them, you need to remember that honest feedback hurts sometimes, don’t take it personally. The attendees who may not have been impressed could be the ones that teach you the most.
Some things to concentrate on are how well you did in recruiting the kind of people you were looking for, and what you could have done better. However, don’t get lost in the hindsight game; more than anything, dig into what you did right. Capitalize on that next time.
Next time? You may be a bit overwhelmed at having to go through all of these steps again to plan another workshop.
The thing is, if you paid attention to all of the steps above, you don’t have to do all the hard work again. You’ve identified your target audience, and given them the solution to a problem which they had. Now, you need to identify the next thing that they are going to need to know.
The Next Logical Problem (Planning a Series of Workshops)
When you solve a problem or give someone a gift, often another need or problem arises. Say you give a child a bike. They now have to learn to ride that bike without falling down. After that lesson, they are mobile. However, they now need to learn how to ride safely on the streets.
No matter what the topic you chose, it logically will lead to another problem, or needed solution, for your attendees. That’s how you look at the next problem for your audience. You have the people, and they now trust you as a teacher. What do they need to know next?
Did you teach them a new skill they will need to learn to buy things for? Did you teach them relaxation techniques that naturally lead to some form of yoga or meditation? Nearly all lessons open up a new area in which a person needs more information.
Final Thoughts
There’s nothing quite as rewarding as identifying an area in someone’s life that you can improve. Choosing to lead workshops allows you to do that at a slightly larger scale and turn your passion for serving your fellow man into a business.
Now that you know how to plan one remember, the most important thing is to keep your target audience in mind. Not just when planning your event, and not just when marketing it, but at every step. So that you can successfully deliver the results they are expecting.
Choose a topic that addresses a pain point for them, and then address it adequately. Make sure that your presentation is polished, but not canned. That way, they feel you are professional and trustworthy.
After all of that, concentrate on making it fun. Engagement and hands-on learning are what sets you apart from an eBook on the topic. People love workshops because of the atmosphere as well as the information.
You now have all the information you need to start planning your first workshop. Do your best, and remember to choose topics you can see growing into subsequent events.
One thing we can tell you is that every person you help is going to appreciate it. You’ve chosen an enriching thing to do, enjoy it!