5 Ways to Have Better Meetings with Explain Everything

Let’s face it – most of us have a hard time getting excited about meetings.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever been to a meeting that was truly productive, you know they can leave your team both inspired and informed.

Teams looking to boost productivity in their meetings will want to get familiar with Explain Everything. It’s the whiteboard app that lets your whole team interact, draw and make changes to live presentations, and share your screen for better collaboration, no matter where you are.

Here are 5 ways you can use Explain Everything to improve the quality of your meetings.

1. Don’t Tell Them What You Mean, Show Them

Have you heard the words, “I’m a visual learner?” It turns out that most of us are. According to the Social Science Research Network, 65 percent of people learn by seeing. That’s why videos go viral more than blog posts. It’s also why Instagram now has more users than twitter.

Explain Everything gets this idea. As an interactive whiteboard, it let’s you show instead of tell, by allowing you to draw and write over anything, including video.

This has some huge implications for client meetings and presentations.

Personal trainer? Pause video of a client’s workout and draw directly onto the video, highlighting where they can improve on form.

Marketing director? Bring sales figures to life by drawing right into your graphs, highlighting key areas, and jotting notes onto your slides while you present.

Now you’ve got the attention of the 65%.

2. Record Entire Meetings, So You Never Miss an Explanation

Ever been in a meeting and drifted away just long enough to miss something important? Of course you can’t always ask for a playback to catch what you missed.

Recording in Explain Everything gets rid of this problem. It captures everything: voices during the meeting, visuals you see on the screen, even the sketches and edits you make during a presentation. Then it saves the whole thing to Dropbox so you can watch it later.

3. Collaborate with Your Team in Real-Time

The screen sharing feature makes this app ideal for creative teams. It let’s everyone in your meeting edit the same project from their own tablet, in real time. You’re all contributing to the same canvas, but everyone has their own screen to work from. And by turning on Editing Permissions, you choose who gets to edit the project, and who gets to spectate.

Have one designer working on text, while another samples colors for a logo, talking back and forth about what to keep and what to change. No more submitting ideas, waiting for feedback, and then trying again – you create together in real time, taking what works and scrapping what doesn’t.

4. Prepare Key Moments in Advance

We’ve all gone into a meeting with something perfectly rehearsed, only to forget our lines at the last minute.

Explain Everything let’s you record key moments in advance, and then access them at the right moment. If you’ve figured out the perfect way to explain something but don’t trust yourself to remember it, save it as an audio clip inside the presentation. Then just hit the play button when you’re ready, and let your pre-recorded explanation do the work.

Or turn your audio into a voice over, by using the drawing tools to explain your point. By the end you’ve got a perfectly annotated video, pre-recorded and ready for the meeting.

5. Import Anything You Want – Seriously, Anything

There seems to be no limit to what you can import into Explain Everything, making it a one stop shop for presentation building. Here are a few of the highlights:

• PPT and Keynote Slides – Import your slides just as they are, and turn every slide into an interactive, recordable whiteboard.
• Web browser – Open a live browser inside the app, and use the drawing tools to mark up webpages however you want.
• Everything on Your Screen – Images, videos, and audio files can all be easily added into your slides. Import from your computer, or download from Dropbox. It’s all fair game.

Get More Out of Your Meetings

This app is a great way to supercharge your meetings. Features like screen sharing make it possible to collaborate whether your team is in one room or spread across time-zones, while in-presentation drawing helps you make sure your ideas are understood. And the ability to record means your valuable meetings still have value when the meeting is over.

About the author:
Josh Doyle is a writer and editor based in Korea. His passion for language has led him to be an instructor and to speaking Korean, and his love for sushi has led him to Japan more times than he cares to admit.