A consultant’s toolbox for increasing client engagement with Mural

How to get clients engaged and excited with MURAL

Consultants have the distinct challenge of coming in blind to how client organizations approach collaboration. You don't know for sure how busy or stressful a client's schedule is beyond your sessions — but often they face back-to-back meetings and collaboration without intention in their day-to-day work.

To ensure your workshops and working sessions stand apart, deliver effective innovation, and that clients actually look forward to them, leverage MURAL's latest and greatest features — specifically designed to get your clients energized and excited.

When you need to design a session or workshop quickly

You solve some of the world’s most complex business challenges and develop world-changing go-to-market strategies. But there’s only so much time in a day to do that. With MURAL, you can design your next session or workshop in minutes — saving you hours of prep time.

• Instead of designing every session from scratch, leverage MURAL’s workflows and guided methods with consulting templates that will jumpstart your collaboration. Templatize your sessions so you can scale your consulting approaches across multiple clients and projects.
• Visit MURAL Home to find personalized recommendations for more effective collaboration. This view includes popular templates for consultants — such as the Business Model Canvas, Value Stream Mapping, and Go Broad to Go Narrow — that can support you no matter where you are in your consulting journey with clients. 

• If you’d like guided tips for how to leverage MURAL no matter what kind of session you plan to run, you can access product how-to videos and tutorials — all within the MURAL app.
• And we’re always delivering small but mighty usability improvements that make collaborating in MURAL even more intuitive than it already is. Recently we made improvements to lock, dragging objects, finding keywords within a mural, and more.

When you need to support async collaboration

The difficulty of capturing and juggling input from multiple stakeholders is amplified when working with distributed, remote, and hybrid teams. When there’s physical disconnection within a team, we often work with the most conveniently available members of the team by default. With feedback from only a specific group in the room, solutions can be unintentionally biased and not optimized for success.

• Before your session, invite your collaborators to join your mural so they can familiarize themselves with the platform and your content. You can invite them as a visitor, for collaboration on an individual mural where the collaborator can choose to remain anonymous — ideal for smaller-scale sessions or projects. Or, you can invite them as a guest, for collaboration with an established profile on all murals in an open or private room to support larger-scale collaboration. 

• To effectively provide pre-work for clients prior to your session, you can add YouTube videos to your outline explaining how to prep for the meeting. Collaborators will be able to play the video while interacting with the content in the mural at the same time.
• Enable asynchronous collaboration with clients from anywhere, anytime by leveraging MURAL’s apps for Android and iOS in addition to the web app. Make it easy for everyone to participate on the device that they prefer.

• To effectively build async work into your meeting culture with clients, use MURAL in combination with Loom. Build out a single source of truth for project collaboration in a mural and use Loom to record details of the project and next steps that collaborators can consume on their own time. With that, synchronous meeting time is more efficient and productive.

When you're facilitating workshops and need to drive more engagement

Low participation and engagement can generate minimal ideas and input from different areas of the organization — which blocks you from delivering the most impact. Using MURAL to structure and facilitate sessions, you can drive strong workshop participation while diving deep into feedback to uncover critical organizational challenges.

• To drive participation and engagement from all stakeholders, bring MURAL into the platforms your clients use every day to properly integrate your session within their existing processes. Encourage everyone to contribute, revisit content, and collaborate with MURAL’s integrations for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google Workspace, Slack, Atlassian, and more.

• Facilitate multiple client meetings all from one mural, rather than many, by using MURAL’s infinite canvas. Avoid context switching between several murals to keep stakeholders engaged and aligned. 
• With Facilitation Superpowers™ features, like summon and ask to follow, you can guide clients throughout lengthy or complex sessions so they focus on the specific topic at hand.
• Use reactions to add a fun human element to your sessions by sharing your feelings visually with emojis — and without interruptions. Or share fun, celebratory moments together by throwing confetti in a mural with the celebrate feature.
• And if you’re a Butter fan like many of us at MURAL, you can use the MURAL App for Butter to bring visual collaboration directly into the fun and engaging all-in-one video conferencing platform.
• With MURAL, you can support strong participation from all stakeholders no matter how many collaborators you have or how large your session with crowd optimization supporting 500+ collaborators.

When you’re looking to design more inclusive feedback and brainstorming sessions

In complex organizations, it’s critical to break down silos and create an environment where clients feel comfortable collaborating and sharing their points of view. Trust and inclusivity is key to deeply understanding clients’ pain points and needs.

• Build psychological safety with clients by kicking off your session with a team building activity in MURAL. A popular one with consultants is the Show and Tell template, where every participant can share and learn something new about one another.
• Using private mode, you can temporarily or permanently prevent collaborators from seeing the author of contributions in a mural to encourage authenticity and avoid groupthink. Use the voting feature in tandem to quickly and anonymously make decisions as a group and ensure all opinions in the room are heard.

• Ensure all clients have the full power of visual collaboration with MURAL’s commitment to accessibility, including our recent launch of the MURAL screen reader.

When you're summarizing trends and getting stakeholder alignment

When proposing complex ideas and solutions, it can be a hurdle to get feedback and approval from everyone. When working across many teams (internal and external) and platforms, keeping everyone on the same page on project developments and getting shared understanding on expectations is difficult.

• Take advantage of shapes, stickies, connectors, GIFs, images, and more to convey complex ideas in a concise and engaging way — which makes it easy for stakeholders to understand and sign off on next steps.
• You can leverage additional layers of organization and structure to visually surface patterns and trends with tags — from project status, to solution priorities, to business categories and more.

• After analyzing and summarizing session trends and takeaways in MURAL, you can easily export a custom selection of your content directly from the browser using a familiar "cropping" style tool — selection export. Then share your exported content as next steps for collaborators or session documentation.

When you’re working with organizations with high security needs or compliance obligations

When collaborating with clients across the globe, trust and security are a major priority. MURAL is enterprise-grade — our rigorous security program enables us to meet the most stringent IT and regulatory requirements.

And with the MURAL Enterprise plan, your organization gets access to advanced security features, giving you greater visibility, security, and control over enterprise collaboration with MURAL — including identity and device management, data protection, information governance, and more.

Whether you’re looking for enterprise-grade collaboration or simply want to learn more about it, we’re here to help.

Get in touch with our sales team.