Having your first virtual meeting

If you haven’t delivered a virtual meeting before, no problem - here’s some hints, tips and example agendas for inspiration. 

Preparing for your virtual meeting

Work with your girls and leadership team to plan each week’s activities:

• What digital platform will you be using? This will determine the length of your virtual meetings. It’s a good idea to give someone the role of timekeeper.
• What activities do girls want to do? Are you working on a programme theme? Does anything need adapting?
• Plan how much time will you spend on each thing. Don’t set your agenda too full; you can always have extra activities to hand in case you have spare time.
• How could you incorporate girls to take the lead and run aspects of the meeting, such as virtual activities and games?
• How could you continue the things your unit loves to do the most? For example,  singing songs, Six/Patrol time, Rainbow chats?
• Do girls need to prepare any resources for the meeting?
• Remember its okay if things go wrong – if not enough girls turn up for the activity you wanted to run, or you have a technology error – plan contingencies and keep calm and flexible.

A warm welcome

Keep this part of your agenda down to 10 minutes maximum – what could you do whilst everyone is virtually arriving?  

• Ask girls to share a favourite thing or memory that they’ve done last week or ask girls to share what interest badges they’d like to work on.
• Try out one of the virtual games on Adventures at home for the perfect virtual ice breaker. There is a demo video for the game Pass the pen to show you how the game works.
• Adapt one of your units’ favourite ice breaker games. You could do a quick scavenger hunt where girls need to find three items in their home, for example, something yellow, something that smells and something that makes them smile.

Activities

This is the core part of your virtual meeting – give it the most time in your agenda. What programme themes are your unit working on? The activities you’d usually do may need some adapting for the virtual space.

• Check out our new How to video series – these are unit meeting activities brought to life via videos. They’re perfect to play in your virtual meeting and girls can follow along.
• Choose a selection of unit meeting activities and skills builders from the programme resources you have available at home. There are a selection of downloadable programme activities available at Adventures at home. Do also take a look at our suggested virtual adaptations.
• Check out the new activities and games on Adventures at home, for example you could choose an idea from the Challenge of the month and do it in the unit.  

Wrap up

If your digital platform has a time limit, you’ll want to ensure girls have time to say their goodbyes and prepare them for the next meeting.

• Give girls a challenge to do over the next week – such as learning a song or an activity from Girlguiding social media.
• Is there anything girls need for the next virtual unit meeting? For example, resources for an activity, a toy to bring to the unit meeting, or maybe supplies for a virtual party or celebration.
• Ask girls what they want to do in the next few virtual meeting.

Example agendas

We've put together example virtual meeting agendas for each section, to demonstrate how your meeting might run in practice. 

Download example virtual meeting agendas (PDF)