Innovative Ways to Close Your Programs
Facilitator Tips Episode 40

Looking for Fun & Creative Ways To End Your Program?

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode shares a number of fun, engaging and innovative ways to conclude or end your program.

<< Go to Episode 39   Go to Episode 41 >>

Do you just wrap up your last session and say ‘goodbye?’ Or, perhaps, you hand out a quick, predictable one-page evaluation form to your group?

You can do better, and your groups will thank you for it. This episode is all about engaging your group right to the very end.

Click the play button above to learn some fun ways to embrace the end of your program.

Want to join the conversation?

Please leave a comment at the bottom of the page (you must be logged in.)

Don’t have a playmeo account? Join today.

Useful Links & Resources

• Colored-Ball Debrief – awesome reflection technique that can be easily varied to provide a fun & interactive way to end your program.
• Unofficial Starts – Click this link if you’re looking for some fun ways to start your program, to build engagement & interaction right from the start.

…EE

Video Transcript

Hi there and welcome to Episode 40 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard, and it’s my pleasure to present to you as an experiential trainer and author a whole series of little tips and strategies that I found really useful to help me facilitate with groups, and today I want to focus on how to end a program.

Now it seems so obvious but for someone like myself who tends not to feel very good about conforming or doing what everyone else has done just because of the way we do it, I tend to find some creative, engaging, or indeed fun ways to do things. And I want to focus, what you do at the end. Now ordinarily what do we do? We hand out evaluation forms or we stand there and get a clap and bow. Look, that can all still happen but maybe there’s some alternatives, and here’s a few.

First of all, find three, that is get up, find three people individually and share with them your response to a question that I have posed. It might be hey, share with someone and three people a highlight, or something that really challenged you, or something that you’ve discovered, whatever the question might be. It will generate a lot more energy to finish your program than the alternative.

If you happen to have certificates, that is, there’s some form of certificate of completion at the end, hand out those randomly to everybody and then ask them to go find the person listed on the certificate and then provide some form of affirmation to that person. And that would be a great way to again engage lots of people, maybe with people who wouldn’t ordinarily meet. Everyone gets their own certificate back.

Moving evaluations, I love this one. In a hall, I will set up a series of posts or stations, each of them dedicated to a particular topic or a question. And I invite people, almost like this is the moving evaluation, to move to as many if not all of those places. When they get there there will be a question such as how much did you enjoy the program, how did this benefit you. When you get there, share your response with who else is also in that same spot. You stay for as long as you want and then you move to another spot, you share with whoever is there. It involves the body. It generates energy. It’s a little different. And you only go to those areas that you really want to respond to.

And a little bit the same, I call this the thought bubble, is that when you get there you actually list what your feedback is. So when you go to each of these stations, you actually determine what it is that you want to share. And it could be a word, a picture, or a phrase and so on.

But there are so many other ways. Maybe you’ve got some ideas you’d like to share as well. Please leave a comment. If you would like some further information check out our show notes at www.playmeo.com Episode 40 in which we have looked at how to end your program.

Hopefully, you found a few useful nuggets of ideas for your own program in here. If not, reach out to me. hello@playmeo.com is my email address and I would love to be able to respond to your questions if you would like some help.

Okay, that’s it for now. I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.