How can I transition a mostly physical community in a mostly virtual or hybrid one?

Question

Due to current events surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, physical meetings are prohibited and can be punished, severely, in the country I live in.

We are an organised service club. Normally, we physically meet biweekly to discuss current events and plan what we're going to do in the not so distant future. Usually, the events we host are a mix of inviting accomplished individuals who give us a talk, doing charity work in our local community (for example building beehives with children, planting trees or cleaning streets) or just meeting up to chat what's going on in our lives.

With the current restrictions in place, we are unable to host any physical events and that may stay so in the near future. While meetings with a low number of persons may be allowed eventually, we could simply be too many people meaning that some could meet up while some have to stay at home.

We have thought about virtual talks and just meeting up virtually to chat but the number of members attending is dwindling slowly but surely. Some have developed some kind of resignation due to juggling multiple tasks at once like working from home, doing university coursework, caring for siblings or elders within their families. After an eventful day, they often don't want to come by and say hello because "This is just another online meeting and I already had like five of them today".

How can we encourage them to come by and attend? How can we remove the feeling that this is just "another online meeting"? How can we transition from being a mostly physical community to a mostly virtual one or even a hybrid one for the future?

For the record, before the outbreak these problems didn't arise and every member is usually committed to our activities and our club life.

Answer 1

Consider adding some sort of incentivization to the online meetings. Maybe each member of your community could receive a token at the end of each meeting (if they showed active participation during the meeting through useful questions and/or answers) and exchange them for certain community services. This way you can gamify the "boring" meetings and make people even compete for these tokens through virtual contests or quizzes.

Answer 2

How can we encourage them to come by and attend? How can we remove the feeling that this is just "another online meeting"?

Make it valuable for them. This is something subjective.

How can we transition from being a mostly physical community to a mostly virtual one or even a hybrid one for the future?

The virtual channels must be in place. The location of the events must be clear. In any case, I do see a lot of value on communication and platforms such as Discord or Slack are key to help guide the lost.

I have used this approach to build a hybrid community of more than 200 volunteers and the Discord server was really helpful.

Answer 3

Well fb would suck for it, but messenger lite is fast and takes videos pretty quick anyone on just about any device can use it, even if there mesenger doesn't work. Sides that like a pc files seperate events into different easily understandable catagories, you know to coodinate kid watching and transports who's available who gets the snap program and spare alittle for said events. Bring bbq grills an stuff. You could do that on your own website that i hear you can host for free in a google drive which is free also. I got it they give you like 15 gigs to start they've offered me lifetime unlimited for 70% off. Kinda wanna take em up on that sometime. And as for hybrid ever heard of chilling tales for dark nights, find people that have favorite episodes of various things and include the names an not links, and then the link to youtube for free stuff, then you could show links that might cost somthing right next to it.