@KarenB - Some suggestions/tips:

Getting your participants ready

• They don’t need an account. As long as you have a paid account yourself, you can share a board with them using the Anonymous Guest Editor feature. You simply open the board, click on the Share button, and set “Anyone with the link” to “Can edit”. You can even set a password on the board.
• If they haven’t used Miro before, you may want to either create aboard that you can direct them to ahead of time where they can experiment - again, no account is required, as long as you have set the board access as explained above. Here are a few examples of such boards (click the title of the board and then the Duplicate button to grab a copy of the board for yourself):
  • Miro sandbox by @Kiron Bondale
  • Welcome to Miro! by @Kim Roth Howe
  • Getting to know Miro by myself, @Robert Johnson  
  • More ideas can be found in the How Do You Miro? Miro 101 Templates Challenge post
• You can read more about this in the following Help Center articles:
  • Collaboration with Anonymous Guest Editors
  • Password Protection for Public Boards
• Keep in mind, any time you want to see what the experience will be like for someone who does not have a Miro account will be like, just open a private/incognito browser window and load the Miro board from there.

Getting your participants to the board

It sounds you were you previously browsing to your Miro dashboard, i.e., where you see the list of your boards. Even if you did send this link to your participants, whey will not be able to see your board.

You will want to send a board link, which is the link you will see when you are on the board. E.g.:

You can also use the following button to copy a board link to your clipboard for pasting into some electronic medium, e.g., email or Zoom chat:

QR Code - Miro doesn’t have this option, but you could use some random QR code generator - just Google “QR code generator”. However, I can’t see many scenarios where anyone would be typing in the full link/URL - they would usually be clicking a link from somewhere.

Presenting/Sharing your screen

While Miro has a “Screen Sharing” option, it will not always show everything exactly the way you see it, e.g., you play an embedded video or cycle through pages of an uploaded document. Just use whichever screen sharing/video conferencing platform that you--and the rest of the world--are currently using - Zoom, Webex, GoToMeeting, Google Meet, Skype, etc.

Other common issues/things to consider

• Navigation Mode on a board - Miro will set a default depending on the user/board participant’s device. They may have a desktop in which case Miro will default to the Mouse navigation mode. But if they have a laptop with trackpad or touchscreen, Miro may default to one of those modes, even if they have a mouse connected. My personal preference is that everyone with a mouse set their mode to “Mouse” - this would make it easier for you when having to explain how to navigate around the board. More on this here → Navigation Mode.
• Whenever you can, made objects for your participants. While, yes, it may seem very easy to create a sticky note (especially when using the N hotkey), I still find it to be a better user experience if I create one sticky note and and they copy and paste it a bunch of times for all of the participants - the same goes with icons, shapes, etc. Just select the object and then Ctrl/Cmd+C to copy, and then, with your mouse where you want the copies to show up, use Ctrl/Cmd+V, V, V, V (just keep going until you are done). Now the participants can grab a sticky from the pile:

  

Well, that’s all I have for now. Let’s see what other tips the Community has for you!

@KarenB - The Miro Academy is another great resource for those new to Miro:

https://academy.miro.com/learn/course/getting-started-with-miro/collaboration/board-collaboration

Hi Karen and Robert,

Karen, thanks for asking these questions in such detail because I’ve been having them too. Though I see that this post is from a year ago, so you’re likely a pro by now! And Robert, your explanations are crisp & clear, much appreciated.

I’ve had the chance to join in on Miro boards during Zoom meetings but haven’t yet started one up myself, will be doing so in about 4 weeks. So I’m on a learning curve too. It will be for facilitating discussions around entrepreneurship.

Robert, you talk about making a pile of objects so participants can choose one and relocate it/fill it in to their liking (the sticky note example above). 

Have either of you tried that for distributing a larger, grouped set of objects? For example, I have many activities where each person uses their own set of partially-populated text boxes to think through a task. I can’t see why it wouldn’t work to have a pile of of these “box-sets” for each person to take and move around.

What we’ve done previously is place 12 of the box-sets in a row, and it seems to create navigational stress.

Cheers,

Meg

@Meg Birch -

There are two options to deal with that situation:

1. Create a stack of grouped duplicate instances of the partially-populated objects and have participants grab one and move it wherever they like. The benefit is the participants don’t need to learn anything new but it can take more setup time, and you need to know the number of participants in advance.
2. Create a template of the grouped object and teach participants how to insert the contents of a template on an existing board. The benefit is that the participants create the objects vs you having to do them in advance. The only downside is the learning curve for showing them how to insert the contents of a template.

Kiron

Thank you Kiron, this is helpful.

In my case I would know the # of participants in advance, so the multiple copies might be best. Also we often want to allow them to see each other’s work, so keeping them on the same board is necessary for that.

That being said, I’ll now be thinking about which situations would allow for folks to create their own board. Nice.

Meg