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Using Zoom for Proposal Writing across Teams

Quyen Wickham
December 20, 2020

Finding it difficult to get your proposal teams to write?

Schedule a half or full day writing session over Zoom! While regular meetings create ample opportunity for brainstorming and discussion, sometimes you need dedicated writing sessions. On a recent proposal with a 20-faculty team, we scheduled two half-day writing sessions that allowed multiple mixed teams to meet for an hour at a time to tackle different parts of the proposal.

This large proposal effort involved seven teams with an average of 5-7 participants in each team (many faculty were spread across 2-3 teams). With thoughtful scheduling, all the teams were able to successfully meet at least once in the two half-day sessions. With the goal of producing written drafts, the effort was a success! Here's what we did:

Pre-session:

  1. Create a dedicated Zoom session that would use the same link though the entire half or full day session.
  2. Send out a When2Meet or Doodle poll to gather the availability of each participant. Encourage participants to make themselves available! Use the poll to create team writing schedules that combines the necessary authors as they are available. Then send invites to participants for their individual breakout sessions.
  3. Designate one or more facilitators. If more than one, have them trade-off being the host to cover the whole session.
  4. Ask all participants to update their Zoom application to the latest version (Zoom does not do this automatically): https://zoom.us/download.
  5. Facilitators should have their computers as well as Zoom up to date. While losing connection won't crash the session, it's best if the host can stay connected.

Day of the session:

  1. Start a few minutes early. The first host will need to set up all the breakout rooms that might be needed throughout the entire day’s session. Name each breakout room appropriately so participants can find their rooms. Create at least one ad-hoc meeting room for small discussions.
  2. Breakout room settings:
    1. Set breakout rooms to never expire (gear icon when creating the rooms)
    2. Allow participants to move in out of rooms on their own
  3. Select screen sharing for all participants

Session tips:

  1. Participants can only communicate with others in the same breakout room. Our team opted to use Slack during the session for cross-team communication.
  2. Participants that failed to update Zoom may need to be shuttled between rooms (one reason for the facilitators)
  3. Facilitators should plan for schedules to overlap a few minutes to allow for handoff and relay any important updates about the session.

I'd like to thank my co-facilitators for planning and hosting this effort: Sabrina Maham, Ofure Ikharebha, Casey Holland, and Melissa Tolson.