ThemeClose & follow up
CardCard 41 of 63
Questions5 to explore

Resources

Worksheets, templates, links & PDFs

Resources are the materials participants leave with so the session can continue working after the call ends.

Resources include anything participants take away: worksheets, templates, reading lists, PDFs, slide decks, links. They extend the session's usefulness beyond the time you have together and give people something to work with when they sit down to apply what they learned.

Online the barrier to sharing resources is low (send a link), but the barrier to using them is also higher than it looks. Receiving a folder of files and actually opening them a week later are two different things. The resources that get used are the ones that are specific, short, and connected to something the participant did in the session.

Online, specificallyIn a physical room you can hand someone a card or a printout that ends up on their desk; online you send a link that goes into their inbox and competes with everything else there, so make the resource single-purpose and easy to act on immediately.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Link during the session

Good facilitators share resource links in the chat during the session, at the moment they are relevant, rather than sending everything afterwards when the context is gone.

Keep it short

They curate two or three genuinely useful resources rather than sending everything they have ever bookmarked, because a long list gets no attention while one good link often gets opened.

Make it actionable

They frame each resource with one sentence explaining what to do with it ('use this template for your next meeting', 'read this before the next session'), so it is clear why the resource is there.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What would participants most benefit from having access to after this session?
Are your resources specific enough to be useful, or are they generic enough to be ignored?
Where will you share them: during the session, in the post-workshop message, or in the async channel?
Do your resources connect to specific exercises the participants did, or are they standalone?
How will you know whether participants actually use the resources you provide?

What trips people up online

A folder of twenty files sent in one email after the session has an effective use rate close to zero; less is almost always more.
Links that require participants to create an account or log in somewhere new create enough friction that most people will not follow through.
Resources that are too general (a book on facilitation, an article about teamwork) feel like homework rather than support; the more specific to today's session, the better.