Remember all those doodles you did while you were in a class in college? Those doodles, if you stretched the imagination a bit, are a form of scribing. Where the virtual comes in is when your artist is located somewhere else in the world and connects to the meeting in a virtual space. Virtual scribing is virtual visual storytelling. You can improve your online meetings and create interest and more engagement with an artist from a creative communication agency who can illustrate the meeting live using words, lettering, doodles and other fun visuals. This is to keep your audience actively involved and taking part in your meeting or presentation.
With virtual scribing, you can paint a picture of what is being said in real-time, increasing engagement and active retention of the information being shared by your participants.
Why Use Virtual Scribing?
The goal is to make the content easier for a consumer or an employee to understand and remember by using visuals to provide a context for the piece. Some companies use storytelling as a learning tool, while others use it in marketing.
When you’re sitting in an online meeting with a lot of information, it’s easy to become sidetracked and let your mind wander. While someone is speaking, virtual scribing is generally done in real-time. They’re also adaptable, allowing them to improve event participation in any venue or format.
When employees, clients, or event attendees see content visualised, it acts as a mental bookmark, helping them recall the most important points from your event or meeting. Visual notes aid comprehension, allowing the audience to move on with a well-defined plan of action. In addition, seeing a cool drawing from a recent meeting or presentation helps individuals retain memory better.
How Does Virtual Scribing Work?
Virtual storytelling mirrors the process of actual writing. The process remains the same whether you use a storyboard or sit-down brainstorming sessions over a few days.
The virtual drawings we make appear quite similar to our usual visual notes; the only difference is that we use pixels instead of markers!
- Brainstorm: We research the organizations, topics being discussed, and the speakers themselves before we start a session. This gives us a background on what your brand is all about and the event itself. All this beautiful research also inspires our illustrations.
- The Session: Your creative communication agency artist (your visual storyteller or graphic recorder) will join your virtual meeting 10 to 15 minutes before it starts. They will silently listen in on your online meeting and pick up on key discussion points. Your artist will sketch live on-screen as your presentation or meeting unfolds, or you can choose to reveal their work at the end of your meeting or training as a review. Sometimes the virtual scribe is used as a facilitation tool bringing it up on screen to discuss what’s been captured and for participants of the virtual meeting to add to the content.
- Reuse, Recycle: At the end of the session, the visual storyteller will give you a digital image file of the virtual scribe and a digital time-lapse video recording of the illustration being created. An added benefit to all this doodling is that you end up with fantastic visual assets for your website, blog, or social media marketing.
What Makes Virtual Scribing Important?
Our digital version of visual notes is ideal for virtual meetings, remote conferences, and online events of all kinds, in addition to all the engagement-boosting advantages that visual notes provide. This is because we can make digital visual notes on your screen from anywhere on the planet!
Our brains were designed to process visual information. Because your brain’s visual system interacts with at least half of the rest of your brain, taking notes with pictures is more in line with how our brains truly function. You’re more likely to recall and grasp a topic if you correlate it with an image. When coupled with a visual metaphor, similar broad or abstract ideas become more concrete.
Visual note-taking also engages the emotions of your audience. Color in visual notes can also draw people’s attention and elicit emotions, allowing them to better connect with the text. Words are abstract and difficult to recall, but visuals are tangible and easier to remember. As a result, when you’re in a meeting discussing future objectives and strategy, and an artist draws visuals to symbolise those goals, it’s easier for everyone in the room to refer to and brainstorm on them.
The Bottom Line
Using virtual storytelling has many benefits, especially when engaging team members and conducting virtual presentations. Are you finding it difficult to engage productively with your team? Add a new and interesting twist to your internal communications. Contact us today.
