13 practical tips for online storytelling workshops

8 June 2023

Joanna Wheeler (Transformative Story) and Alison Buckler (The Open University) 

Technology will always be against us… but this workshop helped me to realise that technology is just a tool. In storytelling, emotion is what is important, and if we can prioritise that, we'll be ok.

Participant in an online storytelling workshop, 2021

As storytelling research facilitators, we have supported hundreds of people to create and share their own stories across many different contexts over the past fifteen years. Our storytelling process has centred on face-to-face creative workshops. In these workshops, we relied on being physically close together (for example to perform drama or dance), and the ability to work with creative techniques such as drawing, collage, sculpting and making things with materials participants can touch.  

When the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to face-to-face workshops, we faced a difficult challenge: how do we take a workshop process that is creative and highly interactive and make it work online without losing the quality of the process? We know that building relationships between participants, as well as between participants and facilitators, is key: trust in the group and the process is essential for storytelling to work well, and we weren’t sure how this would be achieved in a virtual space. As researchers concerned with inclusion, we worried about how to make an online process inclusive: how could we tell if participants were feeling included, and how could we adjust the approach in real-time if we sensed that they weren’t? Essentially, would the process of storytelling “work” if done through a screen? 

Our first attempt to move the storytelling process online was through a series of pilot workshops supported by The Open University in May 2021. Since then, TransformativeStory has offered regular online storytelling and storytelling facilitation courses, and they add a new dimension to what is possible in our storytelling research projects. 

Drawing from our experience, here are thirteen practical tips for making creative, storytelling workshops work well online: 

1. Be ready for people signing up and dropping out before the storytelling starts. People don’t always take a commitment to an online course as seriously as an in-person one at first, and you have to build the commitment quite quickly once you get going. Address this constructively by demonstrating why it is worth their time to invest their energy in the online course, and how they can see it as a resource that they will get something out of. For example, offer an individual wrap-up session at the end of the storytelling process where participants can talk through how they plan to use storytelling in their work and think about applications of what they have learned. This makes the commitment and motivation come together for some people, but for others it won’t. Don’t be unsettled by lots of changes in the participant list at the start, and if you need a minimum number of participants, consider a reserve list. 
    
2. Don’t assume the internet will give you infinite capacity for flexibility. Holding workshops online can make them more accessible for people far away, with mobility issues, with busy lives, or who have other reasons they can’t travel. But scheduling workshops across time-zones and around people’s off-line commitments can be incredibly complex. You will need to decide early-on the extent of flexibility you are going to offer participants. If it is important that they attend (all of) every session, make this clear from the start. Offering ‘catch-up sessions’ can be a gesture towards inclusion and greater participation, but be aware that this can have an exponential impact on facilitators’ workloads, and make sure you are honest with yourself (and the participants) about the pay-off in terms of building and sustaining a sense of community. This is also important to consider when participants have limited band-widths or scheduled/unscheduled power-cuts (issues which may only become evident after the workshop has started). 
    
3. If possible, have more than one facilitator. The first reason for this is practical: leading sessions and facilitating discussion and activities is difficult if you are also running all the technology to support this (creating online breakout rooms, starting recordings, responding to chat messages, etc.) Having two facilitators means the technical process will be smoother. Second, it is harder to notice markers of emotional engagement with the process online. Unless you are a very experienced storytelling facilitator, having two facilitators (one to lead each session and one to monitor engagement and follow up with individuals where necessary) is a good idea. It will make participants feel more supported and you feel less stressed. 
    
4. If you have more than one facilitator, have a separate and private channel of communication with them. This enables a mode of real-time communication not possible in a face-to-face workshop and supports consistency and coherence between the facilitators and ‘in the moment’ personalised support for participants. 
    
5. Cut down your content by at least 50%. It’s difficult to get through the same amount of activities or sessions in an online format as in-person. Certain things take longer, especially the more creative activities that involve drawing and sharing/discussing these, and so you need to be selective about which activities you use and think very carefully about which you can leave out. Another way to cut down the online live content is to make some part of the process self-study or self-guided: technical aspects like recording, editing, learning to use apps, for example, can be done through tutorials or slide decks with videos to support and not covered live in the online sessions. 
    
6. Don’t be scared to try something out even if you’re not sure how it will work. We have found that almost every in-person storytelling activity can be adapted to an online format, although it will often be more individual. For example, we use a dance steps activity in person that involves copying other people’s moves. In the online workshop, we get someone to choose a track each session and everyone just has a dance/listen on their own: the shared experience is of the music, not of the dancing together in the same steps as it would be in person. But taking a pause to listen to the same music at the same time still creates movement and space in the process for connecting with your body and how you are feeling - just in a different and more individual way. Participants’ ability to develop and perform a complex, multi-scene, multi-character drama while being thousands of miles apart from each other is something we’ve especially enjoyed! (tip: actors can use the same ‘backgrounds’ in the online platform to illustrate who is acting in each scene). Part of the fun and the challenge of online workshops means changing how we think about facilitation and being open to new ways of working. 
    
7. Let participants choose if their cameras and microphones are on or off. This is really important because making sure that participants control how they engage with the online space helps to build confidence in the facilitation and the process. We learned that when participants can choose to have their cameras off, this can actually create greater engagement, especially with participants who have physical or mental health reasons to be off camera, and especially during or just after a participant shares their story with the group. Letting participants choose how they engage online is a demonstration of trust, and it doesn’t lead to less or less-engaged participation. 
    
8. Use both the online and offline world to make the workshops richer. Online story workshops mean both a smaller space for working (inside the box of your screen) but also a bigger space for working because you have the expanse of everyone’s worlds (like their home environment and all the things that they have around them) - use both! For example, some participants have filmed/taken photographs/sound recordings where they live, and this adds richness to their stories in a way that is difficult to achieve if you are in a face-to-face workshop with no options to go home and get footage. 
    
9. Have a ‘shared online display space’. When we do face-to-face workshops, we end up with dozens of flip-chart pages blu-tacked around the room. These include instructions for specific activities, but also things like the ‘agreed ways of working’ (which we develop with the group on the first day). Documents like this create and sustain the culture of each workshop and we’ve learned that if these are not available to people throughout, participants are less likely to remember and adhere to the principles for working together that they agreed on. This requires more work for the facilitators (when people feel others are not working as agreed) and can affect trust within the group. We use a Jamboard or a Padlet (both free to access) which the participants refer to regularly across the workshop. 
    
10. You may need to trust people and their creativity more than when you are in person. Because you can't really see what participants are doing a lot of time, you need to trust their ability to be creative. In an online workshop, you give instructions and people literally disappear (go off camera/mute) and you come back with NO IDEA of what will have happened. Often this is a really fun and surprising part of facilitating online: in giving space for participants to be creative on their own, it leads to some imaginative and unexpected responses. It also means that the final stories may be much more diverse in form and aesthetic. This is a lesson that we have also been applying to face-to-face workshops, to trust people more with their own creativity and give them more space if they want it. 
     
11. Be super present and focussed when you are in the online space. You might use the time when the participants are doing an activity with cameras off to put the washing on or turn your bread over, and no one is any wiser. But we’ve found that if you are not really focussed on the session and the people in it, the sense of trust in the space can quickly drain away. The sense of the space of the online workshop is about how concentrated you are in that exact moment you are in front of the camera. 
     
12. Don’t schedule a meeting for the minute you finish or right before you start an online storytelling workshop. Make time to take a break, prepare, or reflect on and process how you feel. Storytelling is emotionally demanding. You may want to build in time either side of a workshop session to transition between the storytelling space and everything else. Remind participants to do this too - the transition can be an unexpected shock for them otherwise. Be aware that what is going on in the rest of your life can and WILL affect how you feel as a facilitator. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean that you can instantly switch on and off.  
     
13. Consider alternative ways of making participants feel cared for. For example, send a personal follow-up message or call someone after a session that you think they found challenging, and be careful when providing text-based feedback (e.g. in the chat box) as (even if it is intended to be supportive) without facial expressions, written communication can be harder to interpret. In all facilitation it is important to pay attention to participants and how they feel. In an in-person workshop, there are many practical ways that you can show that you care about them. But it’s harder to grab a quick (or subtle!) word with someone online, you can’t hand out sweets to provide an energy boost or offer to make a cup of tea for someone who needs one. Relatedly, with online storytelling it’s even more important to ensure participants have easy access to a professional (e.g. a counsellor) to talk to if needed - so make sure there is a budget or a plan for this. Ultimately, online, you need to create new ways of developing an emotional connection to the group and the participants, and the connection that they have with each other, that will make them feel that they are a valuable part of the process, however far away they are.  

We now run storytelling workshops online for many reasons: to be more considerate of budgets, participants’ time and flexibility, disabilities or personal circumstances that make face-to-face workshops challenging for participants, and our awareness of the impact research and training programmes involving international travel can have on the environment.  

Understanding more about how we can respond creatively and effectively to global challenges will be even more important post-COVID. We do not anticipate that online, distance approaches will replace face-to-face research and training, but we believe strongly that they are not ‘second best’: they can offer something distinctive, with multiple applications, greater flexibility and surprising potential for inclusion.