A virtual lunch and learn is an effective way to foster connections with any audience virtually, including employees, sales prospects, and clients.
In this article, we look at a few tips on how to host a virtual lunch and learn.
What is a Virtual Lunch and Learn?
Before we get started, let’s discuss what a virtual lunch and learn actually is. For many companies, a virtual lunch and learn is your opportunity to digitally share information that you want to get across. It could be thought leadership, informal training, personal development, or a sales presentation. Most lunch and learns have three components: an interesting topic, a subject matter expert speaker, and lunch!
Tips for a Successful Event
To host a successful virtual lunch and learn, you’ll need to focus on the following areas:
Choose a topic that matters
Make sure you choose a topic that provides real value to the audience. If you don’t know what your audience wants to learn, consider reaching out for feedback from your community and asking them directly. Your lunch and learn should leave attendees feeling like they learned something new and interesting.
Pick the right presenter
The most effective lunch and learns are led by intriguing presenters who are subject matter experts. The speaker is one of the biggest reasons people attend, so make sure to choose someone that is an authority on your topic.
Structure the conversation
Lunch and learns can take on a variety of forms, including a formal presentation, a panel discussion, or an interview-style fireside chat. Decide which format will resonate best with your audience. Also consider including Q&A at the end of the lunch and learn to foster participation.
Provide food for attendees nationwide
Make sure you’re partnering with a corporate ordering solution so you can easily provide meals for attendees, wherever they’re logging in from. We provide more details on how to do this below.
Build a communications plan
Before your event you’ll need to communicate with your audience to encourage attendance, during the event you’ll need to share house rules (like staying on mute), and after your event you should plan to follow up with your guests and provide actionable takeaways. Make sure you build a detailed communications plan for your lunch and learn—from start to finish—to drive attendance, engagement, and action.
Providing Cost Effective Meals for Your Virtual Lunch and Learn
As the name states, virtual lunch and learns are all about the food. Since attendees are dialing in from their homes, it’s important to partner with a corporate ordering solution that allows you to feed attendees wherever they’re working from. With Grubhub Corporate Accounts, for example, it’s easy to feed your virtual lunch and learns in a cost-effective way.
The first thing you should do is set your budget. There are a few considerations here including the location of attendees. For example, the cost of food is higher in some cities than others. While one meal might cost $10 in one city, it might be $15 in another. You’ll also want to factor in the tax and tip into your overall food budget.
Then, with a Grubhub Corporate Account, you can enable individual meal ordering which allows attendees to independently order meals based on the budget you provided. This ordering type helps eliminate waste and ensures attendees get the meal they’re craving. Individual Meals make it easy to feed attendees with dietary restrictions like allergies or gluten free. And it doesn’t matter where they’re dialing in from—individual meals can be delivered from hundreds of thousands of local restaurants across the country.
Perhaps the best part of a Grubhub Corporate Account is that you only pay for what’s ordered. In the traditional office lunch and learn, businesses catered large meals, and there was often a lot of waste. With individual ordering, your costs are often lower because you aren’t over-ordering. You set your budget, and then you are only charged for the food that was actually ordered. This is a great way to cut costs instead of purchasing food upfront!
Feed Your Virtual Lunch and Learns with a Grubhub Corporate Account
Lunch and learns are a great way to foster connections virtually in a safe, cost-effective and time-saving manner. As you know, a key part of a lunch and learn is lunch! A Grubhub Corporate Account can help you provide lunch to attendees, no matter where they’re dialing in from, while making it easy to stick to your budget.
