Why I Can’t Stop Talking About Mural – My Go-To Virtual Collaboration Tool

First, what is MURAL?

The MURAL website says: “MURAL is a digital workspace for visual collaboration, where everyone can do their best work together.” It’s like a giant, online whiteboard, where you can draw tables and participants can add and move “stickies” (virtual post-it notes), vote and more.

I have used MURAL many times in the last year, for conducting advisory boards, working with groups to draft strategic plans and for highly engaging brainstorming sessions.

Three reasons why I love MURAL:

1.Great for collaboration

MURAL helps groups to work collaboratively in virtual meetings and engages all team members.  Just share a link with your team and everyone can access the same mural. You can simultaneously add ideas on stickies and move them around. This gives your session energy and a greater diversity of opinions and input. Everyone has something to do, rather than waiting for their turn to talk.

2. Inexpensive, Easy and fun to use

The first time I used MURAL, I was up and running within minutes. It’s intuitive to use for those who are tech-savvy. Even meeting participants who are not that comfortable with new tools can get up to speed quickly, especially with the help of a skilled facilitator.

Seeing grouped, colourful stickies provides a fun, clear visual of your topic, all in one place. When you can easily see the big picture like this, it’s easier to keep a group focussed and figure out what to do next.

Mural is free to participants and a meeting host can get a license for as little as $12/month so it is well worth a try.

3. Helps you get work done, quickly

When you have everyone working simultaneously, you can quickly bring together ideas, prioritize and make decisions. In MURAL you can use grids to plot ideas, move or number ideas to prioritize and there’s even a voting function.

Remember ‘in-person’ sessions where you had to move around the room to collect post-it notes, decipher the handwriting, and remember where the post-it belonged if it fell off the wall?!

Now that messages can be typed out, the ideas appear clearly, on the mural. No more rolled up flipcharts to take home at the end of the day!

If you want to collaborate, engage and have fun while getting your work done quickly, try MURAL. Better still, join us for our upcoming MURAL Workshop for facilitators to add to your virtual facilitator toolkit.

Susan Gregory, Certified Facilitation First Trainer and Professional Meeting Facilitator