Today we’re excited to share Gather Conversations with you. Over the past year, Conversations has grown naturally out of the ways we’ve observed our partners in museums and lifelong learning institutions engaging, inspiring, and learning in dialogue with their communities. With Conversations, you can offer an additional way for your community to meaningfully interact and extend the experience of programs before, after, and between sessions.
What is Gather Conversations?
We’ve consistently heard from our partners that after a program ends, the conversations that developed during it often feel like they vanish. They wanted to know: how can we facilitate ongoing discussion and exchange in between programs?
Gather Conversations is a conversation channel that allows staff, speakers, hosts, instructors, and participants to engage in conversation with each other around any program or item of content. With Conversations, you can:
- Extend the experience of programs before, after, and between sessions by enabling participants to join the discussion.
- Encourage new engagement with recorded programs and on-demand content.
- Deepen learning opportunities with prompts.
- Allow your community to share images that they’ve found or of things they’ve created.
- Gain valuable feedback to inform future programming.
Inviting and valuing participants’ contributions creates more resonant and impactful learning. When we have space to share our own reflections and the opportunity to hear others’ perspectives, we develop a sense of community.
Conversations is the first of Gather’s community features, but it’s only the start. Our mission is to create connections through learning, and we hope you’ll join our cohort of organizations using Gather to create more enriching and participatory environments for connecting with our communities online.
Read more about building community and encouraging participation in our earlier posts:
- Building a Collaborative Framework for Online Community
- Engage on your own terms: How 3 museums create welcoming online learning experiences for adults
How can I use Gather Conversations?
Gather Conversations is a place to facilitate conversations before and after programs and in-between sessions for series, and create moments of gathering around recorded programs or other on-demand content. Some use cases we heard from partners as we designed Conversations are:
Before a program:
- Invite participants to share their questions.
- Ask participants to respond to a poll.
- Share a prompt that invites participants to begin engaging with the program topic and connect it with their own lives.
During and after a program:
- For hands-on or creative activities, participants can share a photo of what they made with us and the community, and respond to each other’s creations.
In between sessions:
- Participants can continue asking questions or share ideas as they develop.
- Participants can share what they’ve read recently that relates to the program or course.
After a program:
- Participants can continue sharing their work and interests with each other without needing to reveal private contact information.
- Invite participants to share their reflections, questions, and what resonated with them.
- Use what you’ve learned about your community through Conversations — such as participants’ questions and the topics that most activate the dialogue — to inform future programming and content development.
How can my organization begin using Gather?
We’re excited to launch Conversations and collaborate with partners to creatively use it to support their missions and build deeper communities among their audiences. Request a demo to see Gather in action and learn more about how museums and lifelong learning institutions are using Gather to bring together their communities, programs, and content.
