We created an 8-part series on how to get the most from town hall in Microsoft Teams. In episode 3/8, we show you how to:
- Build a custom event invitation using your organization brand
- Create a separate invitation for presenters
- Set up specific permissions for event co-organizers so you can share control of your event
- Add external presenters and set event access
- Create a short form URL so you can avoid sending follow-up invites
-
Invite attendees and publish – TA DA!
Video Transcript
Introduction
Well hello, welcome back to our ongoing series on how to get your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. We’ve already discussed what’s new in Town Hall, and we’ve begun to set up our own event of Worktank All Hands using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams, so be sure to check out those videos if you haven’t. For now, we need to get our presenters and our attendees invited, so let’s hop into it. So in our calendar, we’re going to go to our Worktank All Hands event that we created in the last video. We have this event right now.
Calendar
Our branded look sort of natively has this purplish thing. Our Worktank brand is gray, orange, and whites, a little bit more minimal, so we’re going to want to change that. So up here we go to Manage Event. Let’s go to theming.
Manage Event
Right here on the left, you’ll see that we have the ability to change a few things. So we’re going to change our banner image, and there we go. We can zoom in, we can keep it out, keep it out. I think that fits. Same thing with the logo. For our theme color, we can’t actually be too specific at the moment right now, which is a little unfortunate, but they have most of the spectrum, so you can kind of get close enough. And there we go. So now if we go to emails over here, our invitation.
Preview Invitation
We can preview, and it looks a little bit more like this. So this is what people will get in their inbox. It’ll be a little bit more Worktank-y. So we need to invite some of these people, though, so let’s go back to details. At the bottom here, we have presenters and co-organizers.
Presenters
So presenters, let’s say most people from your organization will be added already. It’ll sort of, it’s like any sort of Teams meeting, it knows who’s in your network. So we’ll go ahead and do these folks here who aren’t real. And our co-organizers, a little bit different than presenters. Co-organizers are sort of a co-producer for you. They are able to take people live, they’re able to end the meeting, they’re able to sort of control certain things that regular presenters aren’t.
Co-Organizers
It is very important that you add some co-organizers before you change anything else. I have noticed, and hopefully this gets updated, but I have noticed that if you make a change to, let’s say, the Q&A widget, and then try to add a co-organizer, it’s sort of locked. So you need to make sure your co-organizers are set before you really get started too heavily. So we’ll say producer one is going to be our co-organizer.
Invite Attendees
So let’s also say we have some external presenters, which you probably do, so they’re not in your specific network. There, here you can add anybody. Our event access, your organization, anybody within the Worktank sphere here, whatever company you are with, only they can see it. Any sort of public person isn’t going to be able to come in unless you add them as external. Public, anybody can come in. People in groups, more specific. We’ll keep your organization for us right now. Invite attendees, there are two ways to do this. Two ways you can play. You can add people directly. This is how they’re going to get that themed email. You can do groups, which is nice, so we have a group called Fireside at Worktank. That one email is going to shoot off to several people. The other way that you can handle this is to not add any attendees here, and instead, once you set the event, send the URL to a link shortener or something. Maybe it’s a link on your website. The benefit of that is if anything in the back end needs to change, you need to make a different event, you need to pivot hard, you don’t have to update it to people. They just have to click the link, and you change the link, and they will never even know that you had to change where that directs to. Cons: you have to invite them to that specifically and make a whole look for that. That’s the nice thing about Town Hall, so you don’t have to worry about that. So that’s a, just want to put that out there. For now, we’re going to add our Fireside folks, and let’s double check everything.
Add Fireside Attendees
We have our name, love it. We have our date and time, happy about that. We have our description. We have a co-organizer. We have a member of the team that’s going to be able to help us out. We have our presenters signed up. We have some external presenters, and we know we’re sending it to our Fireside group. We know our theme, we’re happy with that. So let’s go up to save. Before you hit save, something to note: hitting save at this point, an invite will get sent out to the presenters, not the attendees. We’ll get to the attendees in a moment, but saving here does send that out to presenters, so some folks will get an email. So let’s go and hit save. And now we’re ready. We’re excited for this to go out to everybody. Getting published is going to send out our themed email to our attendees.
Publish
So let’s go ahead and hit publish. Ready to publish? We’re going to do it. Let’s do it. That’s it. Invites are sent out. Presenters now know where to go. Our attendees are getting excited, they got these gorgeous invites. But once we are live, how are attendees communicating with us? What’s that look like? In our next video, we’re going to take a good look at the new and improved Q&A widget in Town Hall on Microsoft Teams. But for now, for Worktank, my name is Sean, and I’m curious, what do you think about the new branded invite look? Are there any presenter or attendee invite features you’d like to see in the future? Let us know in the comments, along with any other questions you have about Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. Until next time, thanks for watching.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more on all things live events, and check out our website at worktankglobal.com for more videos, blog posts, and information on how to take your event to the next level.
Jump to other episodes: