Digital Scribing: The Virtual Meetings and Events Engagement Tool

...we draw in real-time...this really grabs the attention of the viewer, bringing your words to life and retaining the energy of a live event.
— Tom Bradshaw, Digital Scribe

Digital scribing provides an amazing way of improving the experience and impact of meetings and events delivered virtually. Our scribes add rich visuals to a speaker’s words live or in post, making virtual events engaging, memorable and unique in this new remote world. The visual translation our scribes apply to a talk also makes information more understandable, explaining complex ideas in through devices like visual metaphors while connecting different ideas together to highlight the ways they connect.

You may also know digital scribing as visual scribing, visual note-taking, graphic recording or sketch noting. Is digital scribing right for you? It can be very effective when applied in situations such as client meetings, virtual conferences and webinars, managing remote workers and coordinating collaboration in a remote world.

Client meetings and pitches

Standing out, explaining clearly and landing messages have always been in important in client meetings, and virtual meetings don’t make this any easier. They do provide new opportunities to innovate though, with tools such as digital scribing. Digital scribing allows your points to be made powerfully:

  • in a way which is memorable

  • makes important and complex ideas understandable

  • helps you beat meeting blur

The real time recording of the scribe session, alongside individual visual assets prepared for future use, gives the meeting a legacy - leaving participants with a lasting reminder to take away.

Virtual conferences and webinars

Virtual conferences and webinars are a great way to beat the challenges created by COVID-19 and to keep sharing important ideas and speakers. When people are accessing this through a screen though, maintaining engagement becomes even more essential. The information and ideas being discussed can be complex, require a lot of focus or be hard to understand. Digital scribing allows event organizers to rise to both these challenges. The live aspect of scribing holds people’s attention while the explanatory visuals make the points being made clear, accessible and linked. These visuals can also be turned into materials that can be distributed post event

Managing remote workers and teams

Working from home has become an essential part of life as we adapt to new ways of working post COVID-19. It’s important to ensure that everyone is in sync and operating from shared principles. This is much easier when teams are working from one location, but digital scribing allows managers to overcome these challenges. The clarity digital scribing brings to communications is an ideal way to make information clear, acting as a common reference point for the whole team - no matter how far apart they might be. The scribing animation can be turned into a real time video, and individual assets can be turned into visuals ideal for emails and social media, to make these messages even more long lasting.

Collaboration under remote conditions

Overcoming challenges and creating new solutions requires collaboration, whether it’s creating new office regulations or bringing people together for government policy meetings and institution led plenaries. Working remotely, this isn’t easy, but it is more important than ever in moments like these to collaborate. Digital scribing empowers discussions, acting as visual notes and reference points for those involved to work from and tracks the conversation. This means that despite the distance you can still create productive and effective collaboration as you solve the problems that face you. The real time recording of the session and other visual assets can become a powerful foundation for future developments and next steps.

Digital scribing is a great tool that allows you to not only overcome the challenges of COVID-19, but also to get the most out of new technologies - creating events and meetings which have even more impact.

Translating ideas and messages into engaging and memorable visuals is at the heart of what our scribes do, we’d love to work with you and add a visual thinking to your video conferencing. Contact us today.

Cognitive are award-winning pioneers of whiteboard animation, and the creators behind the RSA Animates series. We help corporate, academic and charitable organisations like the BBC, TED, Coca Cola and Sanofi to tell their stories more powerfully. Find out more about us here.