Best Practices for Hosting a Large Zoom Meeting

If you plan on having a large event in Zoom, whether it’s a large course, a virtual conference, or a live event it’s extremely helpful if you have a dedicated technical helper to manage the Zoom meeting. The presenters should be focused on engaging the audience while someone in the background ensures participants' microphones are muted and addresses questions through chat.

Schedule at least 30 minutes with your presenters and stakeholders a few days prior to your event to review the technology, discuss roles and tasks, and finalize your content to make sure that your day-of, is as stress-free as possible.

There are certain cases where a normal Zoom Meeting may not be appropriate for your event. In that case, you may want to consider using Zoom Webinars, a separate Zoom product. For more information including a feature comparison, see Zoom Webinar Services.

Tips for Host

1. Once the meeting begins, make any co-presenters or technical helpers co-hosts. See the section “Using co-host in a meeting” in this Zoom guide.
   
   
2. Familiarize yourself with the security button in Zoom. Only the host can see and use the Security button during a Zoom meeting. If it’s a very large event, consider making your technical helper the host to allow them full control over managing potential disruptions. The technical helper would then make you the co-host. The co-host will still be allowed to share their screen and lead the meeting.
   
   
3. If polling is something you want to use, consider using Poll Everywhere which is much more robust than the polling feature included in Zoom.
   
   
4. Decide when/if you would like to record the session. If you plan to send the recorded session to participants after, it’s best to begin recording right before the actual presentation begins.
   

Tips for Technical Helper

Reduce Noise

The key to a successful session with a large number of participants is keeping all unnecessary noise to a minimum. If the meeting is set up using the settings above, all participants will come into the room muted. However, they will be allowed to turn their microphones on. If this becomes an issue, or if you would like to prevent it entirely, follow this guide to mute all participants and uncheck the option “Allow Participants to unmute themselves.”

Manage Chat

The Zoom Webinar has a Q&A feature that allows questions to be asked by participants and answered by the presenters or panelists more easily than the regular Zoom chat. Depending on the needs of the event, there are two ways to approach replicating this feature.

First, if there can be multiple people answering chat questions, it’ll help make sure questions are answered in a timely fashion. It helps in this scenario to use @ with the participant’s name to ensure they know you are responding to their question. For example, “@mike the answer to your question is…”

Another option is a simple Google Form to solicit questions during the session. If you use this method, make sure to share the link to the Google Form in the Zoom chat, multiple times throughout the session so participants can easily find it. Participants who join the meeting late cannot see chat messages sent from before they join. You may also consider disabling participants using the chat feature entirely to encourage use of the Google Form.

Managing the Waiting Room

The Waiting Room is one of the easiest ways to ensure your meeting is secure. Practice letting everyone into the room and allowing one person at a time. If registration is required, you can reference it to ensure the person is registered before allowing them into the room.