Connected Beginnings National Forum
Building a bespoke website to host the national Connected Beginnings Forum.
Connecting Across Australia
Connected Beginnings aims to support early childhood and health services to work together to better prepare Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children for school in selected communities. The overall aim is to decrease the disparities in school readiness and educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children using a Collective Impact approach.
The Connected Beginnings Forum was designed and facilitated by Ninti One. The forum was designed to promote learning through community experience, offer opportunities to learn from thought leaders and professionals, promote peer-to-peer learning and to start a national community of practice between Connected Beginnings Communities. The forum was hosted online due to the COVID pandemic.
CMM was contracted to build online access for participants that would be engaging consider different time zones, digital capabilities, and platforms. We chose to build a bespoke website to run the conference from.
MAKING THE MOST OUT OF BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER ONLINE
We know that people engage with information in all different ways and we wanted to offer this through a virtual environment.
We built the forum website so to offer a straight forward and hassle free way for participants to fully participation and engagement in conversations. A lot of information is usually presented during a forum and we wanted to offer different ways for participants to browse and watch available resources at a pace that feels right to them.
The forum website holds everything in one place - reducing barriers to access from time zones, digital skills, and connection issues. Participants had access to an interactive agenda that provided:
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Links into the live forum video sessions (these links convert into a video after the session so that you can watch the presentation and discussion)
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View all presentations, related material and presenter bio's
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Secure participant log in and individual participant information page (this is controlled by the participant)
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Q&A Forum to enable participants to explore the questions that they are interested in with other participants and community leaders and experts.
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Online one on one or group chat between participants, facilitators and tech support
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Links into collaboration software (we used Padlet for this forum)
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Participants could find their way around the event and engage in information in multiple ways through a one click link
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The forum website is still live and still has high traffic from participants of the forum who can now use it to take other people through the presentations and conversations of the forum
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CMM also live scribed the sessions to capture the conversation in a way that could be used after the forum.
Everything in one place
Participants to the forum can access everything they need from one place. through an interactive agenda that has video links, and access to all content and collaboration tools.
Capturing the conversations in a meaningful way
We live scribed each of the conversations throughout the forum to help soften the heavy presentation and offer another way for people to engage with the information being presented.
