Run Productive Virtual Town Halls: 10 Must-Try Tools

Leaders of remote and hybrid organizations face unique challenges in bringing together different cultures and ideas or aligning their employees around company objectives. A virtual town hall meeting is an effective tool for enabling an engaged, aligned, and motivated remote workforce that drives your business’s success.

When scheduling or hosting a virtual town hall, being armed with the right tool can make all the difference. Discover the top 10 must-try tools below!

What is a virtual town hall meeting?

As an executive leader, you understand the importance of keeping your remote and hybrid teams informed about your company’s vision. Virtual town halls are company-wide meetings held virtually led by a member of the leadership team, and are an excellent platform to communicate vision and inspire confidence.

In these meetings, your remote and hybrid employees will receive updates on company news and crucial developments. They will also get visibility on the overall progress towards company goals and an understanding of your business’s performance. By participating in these town halls, employees will establish a firmer sense of community and company culture, which is critical to success in today’s remote work environment.

Virtual town halls also offer the leadership team an opportunity to engage in two-way communication, Q&A sessions, and breakout rooms to encourage teams and departments that may not interact often to engage with one another.

The benefits of hosting a virtual town hall

• Employee engagement: Virtual town halls allow executive leadership to connect directly with employees, share company updates, and answer questions, enhancing their communication strategy. This keeps your employees engaged across different teams and departments.
• Reflect & promote company values: Town halls give CEOs or other executives a platform to communicate company values and lead by example, and for virtual or hybrid employees to see values in action.
• Foster an inclusive work environment: With employees attending remotely from around the world, virtual town halls create an inclusive space for all team members to participate equally.
• Strengthen company culture: Regular virtual town halls bring employees together and help maintain strong relationships and culture despite remote work.

10 must-try tools for productive virtual town hall meetings 

Looking to ensure your virtual town hall meetings are as productive and efficient as possible? Here are 11 must-try software options with the features that make it all possible.

• Meeting productivity tools
• Meeting engagement tools
• Meeting organizational tools
• Video conferencing tools

1Meeting productivity tools

Fellow

First is Fellow, the only all-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software for remote and hybrid teams to have exceptional virtual meetings. With Fellow, it’s simple for employees across all departments to collaborate on meeting agendas, take notes, and exchange feedback. With advanced AI meeting recordings, transcriptions, and summaries, Fellow captures an accurate record of discussions for anyone to refer back to easily. It will also automatically send a meeting recap to all attendees, ensuring organizational alignment. Fellow also boasts 50+ native integrations with tools like Asana, Hubspot, and Slack, seamlessly centralizing your entire workflow.

Breve

Another tool for meeting productivity is Breve, which makes it easy to send pre-recorded video updates to employees and hold asynchronous town halls. With Breve, senior leaders can effortlessly record and send video updates to their coworkers from their phones or laptops and even measure engagement so they know how to improve next time. This way, it’s easy to keep everyone in the loop across various time zones. Just share the recording to Slack or Microsoft Teams and meet your employees where they are.

Zoho Meeting

Zoho Meeting is secure online meeting software for videoconferencing and webinars. This secure platform empowers your organization to find new and efficient ways to collaborate and work remotely. It’s great for interactive live streams—like town halls—since it offers functionality for screen sharing, live polls, and Q&A sessions. Plus, users can share the web meeting recordings with employees who couldn’t attend the town hall, ensuring everyone can access important information. 

2Meeting engagement tools

Mentimeter

Another option for a virtual town hall meeting is Mentimeter. This tool aims to engage the audience and eliminate awkward silences by making it easy to build slides and presentations, send out live interactive polls and quizzes, and collaborate on word clouds, so there’s more participation from town hall attendees. Creating interactive slides to ask questions to employees on matters that impact the organization, gather feedback on important issues, and connect with attendees to build strong relationships is simple.

Pigeonhole Live

Virtual teams should also consider Pigeonhole Live, a great option for virtual and hybrid town hall events. For virtual meetings, attendees are encouraged to voice their concerns, share ideas, and brainstorm solutions! This tool is also great for engagement as it offers Q&A sessions, polls, chats, reactions, and analytics features. Pigeonhole Live can also be customized with unique branding elements, or companies can choose a custom theme.

3Meeting organizational tools

Pizzatime

Virtual teams looking to come together and boost morale should consider Pizzatime. It offers simple team bonding for all virtual events, brainstorming sessions, virtual conferences, and town halls. Attendees can not only easily join these remote sessions but can also do so while the app coordinates food and drink delivery. Meeting hosts let the app know of the date and time of the virtual town hall, and Pizzatime will take care of nearly everything else.

EveryTimeZone

EveryTimeZone can assist in knowing what time it is in the world for all of your team members, so there’s no more mental math to get teams on the same page. Just choose your coworkers’ time zones and share events directly to the timeline. This tool can also pick meeting times that work best for all attendees. Pick the team members you need to meet with, and the tool will suggest the most workable times for everyone, keeping in mind local business hours.

4Video conferencing tools

Google Meet

A secure platform built on Google’s infrastructure, Google Meet makes it simple to bring everyone in your organization together virtually. This tool allows for an unlimited amount of meetings and has features like live captions, meeting host controls, in-call messaging, and screen sharing. Especially if your organization uses Google Workspace, this tool is your best option. Plus, Google Meet integrates seamlessly with Fellow’s Chrome extension, which makes it easy to collaborate on meeting agendas or record your meeting without leaving your video call! 

Zoom

Zoom helps remote organizations host virtual meetings, chat online, and collaborate with whiteboards—all through a secure platform. It syncs with calendars, so it’s easy for you or your EA to schedule a town hall at a time that works for everyone, and attendees can join the call from anywhere on any device. Fellow also has a Zoom integration, which allows you to access the town hall agenda within the call, ensuring it runs smoothly and effectively.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is perfect for organizations that use Microsoft 365. This video conferencing tool allows you and other attendees to screen share company decks or even use the Together mode to be in the same space virtually. It can even support larger organizations, as it has the bandwidth to host web conferences and webinars with up to 1,000 attendees. Fellow’s Microsoft Teams integration makes it easy to collaborate on meeting agendas, take minutes during the town hall, and send feedback requests without leaving the Teams app.

Free town hall meeting agenda template

Ready to foster a culture of celebration and open internal communication at your company? Check out this template curated by Aydin Mirzaee, CEO and Co-founder of Fellow:

One tool for all your virtual meeting needs 

A virtual town hall meeting is the perfect platform to share key business information, foster strong connections, and communicate company objectives and values. Selecting the right meeting software is crucial to empower executive leaders to maximize their effectiveness, and there’s one that truly does it all.

Fellow is an all-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software for remote and hybrid teams that streamlines your meeting workflow. Fellow provides a seamless experience, allowing effortless feedback, comprehensive meeting notes, and accurate AI transcription. You can even build thoughtful town hall meeting agendas and suggested talking points with our AI agenda builder to elevate meeting quality. Plus, with workspace analytics, executive teams can gain insights into meeting productivity patterns, ensuring every virtual town hall is more productive than the last.

See how Fellow can take your virtual town halls from so-so to spectacular. Get started today!