Do you, like us at red10 , want to increase participation in meetings?

Are you actively using the chatbox in whatever video conference platform you are using, yet frustrated that you can’t cluster ideas together into themes or display it better visually?

Are you missing sticky note brainstorms?

Then you’ll be interested in Mural®…
…it’s one of the advanced tools we recommend in our FREE VIRTUAL KIT.

Bag of Tools & Techniques

If you find this article useful, have you seen our Free Facilitator’s Kit for Virtual Meetings ?

Free Facilitator’s Kit for Virtual Meetings

This article is one of the Tools in our 3Bs Virtual Kit – Basics, Behaviours and Bag of Tools to help leaders facilitate great virtual meetings. There are advanced tools that you may be interested in too, such as Breakout Rooms and Annotations for prioritizing

Wanted this for a long time

We’ve tried a few Virtual Sticky note tools or workarounds over the years and found ourselves disappointed each time:

  •  Many of the tools were clunky and slow, and only allowing one person to add/move sticky notes at a time.
  • One of the tools was great yet required you to first immerse in an Xbox style shoot-em-up format. The tool was wonderful yet but the 3D environment made it less accessible for people.
  • One client we work with achieves participation through everyone editing the same PowerPoint, at the same time, which is tricky.

So we were delighted to be introduced to Mural® – a virtual sticky note tool that:

  • Is fast – and became even faster after a “rendering upgrade” in Jun 2020
  • Is simple to use – just double click and type to create a sticky note
  • Allows even teams of 20-30 to all use it at the same time

How we at red10 use Mural®

Mural® provide a wealth of help guides and templates. We prefer to keep it simple:

  1. Start the video conference
  2. Have Mural® set-up beforehand with a blank canvas
  3. Put the link in the video conference chatbox – asking people to use the link in Chrome
  4. Run a simple exercise to create, move then cluster sticky notes

Creating sticky notes is as simple as double-click and type.

A drag and drop moves the sticky notes, just as you’d expect it to.

You cluster sticky notes by right-clicking to create an area that you place the sticky notes into. You can then move the set of notes about using a drag and drop.

Our 5 Top Tips

  1. Mural® is optimized for the Chrome browser and it really does alter functionality
  2. You don’t have to skill up a team to use it – you can use it and just screenshare. E.g. it is useful just as a more appealing and agile visual for note taking. I quite often use it when I am mediating or building an alliance between two groups.
  3. Invite via the Visitor Link rather than their other options – then people don’t need to register and it doesn’t ask you pay extra licence fees after your free trial.
  4. Ask the team to disciplined. Mural® works really well, but you can confuse it with chaos, e.g. by deleting someone else’s sticky note as they are mid-creating it. The tool needs to used calmly.
  5. You can import slides as backgrounds for your sticky notes.

What have you found?

How have you found Mural®?
What are your tips?