Zoomsgiving
If you are reading this, thanks for clicking and checking out our new website. The purpose of this blog will be to share financial planning tips, tax planning strategies and general financial market information. However, for my first blog post I thought I would go with something very 2020 – tips on how to host socially distanced holidays.
If you are like me, you and your family are regularly on video conference meetings and are suffering from Zoom fatigue with large person meetings. Yet, I am still in awe of the technology. I’m dating myself but I remember waiting in line to call home from a pay phone while I was in the Marines. We typically host Thanksgiving and it is my favorite holiday but that wasn’t possible this year. However, I was determined to make the best of it.
So, with that spirit I volunteered to host a virtual Thanksgiving which I dubbed Zoomsgiving. I was looking to have a better experience than a large Zoom gathering where people tend to talk over each other yet at the same time not having much to say. So I came up with the idea to mimic how we host and attend a party, a welcoming area with several rooms that that give people a chance to mingle and interact in a smaller setting, just like we do for in person parties.
There are a few technical things you need to do to make this happen. The first is to create the breakout rooms, below is the rooms that I created. The second is to check the option to lets participants choose room, this will allow people to move and mingle throughout the party. I did leave some additional breakout rooms at the end for people looking for one on one talks.
As the Host, I met everyone at the Front Door, just like I would in a regular party. I encouraged them to try out different rooms. As the host, you will be able to see what rooms people are in and can help move people who were having some technical difficulties. My family enjoyed this enough to ask me to do it again for Christmas.
I hope you and your family find this helpful and want to wish you a Happy Holidays.
If you find this helpful or have some feedback please send me an email Michael.Mehltretter@lpl.com
-Mike