Purpose of the events
The purpose of the online events was twofold:
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1)
To inform trial participants and other stakeholders of the trial findings
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2)
To enable attendees to ask questions about any aspect of the trial, its results and implications arising from the findings
Event programme
The programme for the events was the same for all three events and each event lasted for about 90 min. Four trial team members spoke for about 60 min in total, followed by a 5-min break and 25–30 min for a facilitated question and answer session (see supplementary file 1).
Running of events
We decided to plan three events with the intention of having more if the dates we proposed left many participants still unable to attend. The events were arranged for different days and different times—one lunchtime (12.30–14.00) and two evenings (18.30–20.00). Events were delivered in English.
Each event was limited to 100 attendees in order to allow the sessions to be interactive and manageable from the trial team’s perspective. Registration and waiting lists were managed through Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/), which is free to use for free events such as ours. The Eventbrite event page could be kept private so only people with a link were able to register.
Stakeholders/attendees
All women taking part in the ActWELL trial and who had not withdrawn or moved away from Scotland were offered an invitation to the online events. ActWELL participants were women eligible for the UK breast screening programme (i.e. aged 50–70 years), with a mean age at baseline of 59.1 years (SD 5.44). Trial participants came from all socio-economic groups, with 16% from SIMD 1 and 2 (areas of highest social deprivation) in Scotland. Most women were of White British ethnicity (95%).
Other stakeholders including BCN lifestyle coaches, breast screening centre staff and leisure centre staff were also identified by the trial team and invited by email. Email addresses were available for most trial participants; those without an email address were sent postal invitations.
Invitations and permissions
One invitation was designed for all stakeholders and for both email and postal distribution (see supplementary file 2). Due to data protection laws, the BCN volunteer lifestyle coaches had to be invited by BCN staff who held their contact details. Dissemination of trial results to participants, and holding dissemination events had been included in the initial NHS REC review. Our events were held after the formal end of the ActWELL study and we confirmed with the University of Dundee sponsor representative that the proposed events were acceptable. Anyone interested in attending was asked to register for the event on Eventbrite.
Platform and event management
Two hosting platforms were considered for the events: Microsoft Teams (Meetings/Live; https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software) and Zoom (Large meeting/Webinar; https://www.zoom.us). The platform had to enable an interactive session and we chose the Zoom Large Meeting add-on. Many members of the public are now familiar with Zoom, there is evidence that research participants prefer it to other platforms [4], and with the large meeting add-on, it was possible to let attendees ask questions both via chat and audio. Further benefits of using Zoom were that it integrates well with Eventbrite and enables you to communicate with your registered attendees, as well as send out an Evaluation survey using Survey Monkey (https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk). There was some initial resistance from our institution (the University of Aberdeen) to give approval for Zoom because its institutional platform is Teams and because of data security fears. However, concerns about Zoom security fears in October 2020 were reduced compared to earlier in 2020, especially with Zoom’s use of passwords and Waiting room. Evidence that research participants preferred Zoom was also persuasive. Permission to use Zoom for these events was therefore granted by the University.
Event management and technical assistance was hired for the events so that the team had someone who was very familiar with the platform and who was able to “produce” the event and help it run smoothly as well as to record it (https://stauntonmedia.ie/). The sessions were recorded mainly for internal learning purposes and with a view to possibly make it available to participants who could not attend events if requested. Otter.ai (https://otter.ai) was used for live captioning of the events as it integrates with Zoom to provide captions in a separate browser window.
Event management also provided help for attendees with joining and other technical issues, which meant they could contact a member of the team behind the scenes via email.
Evaluation
To get feedback from attendees and to help us make suggestions for improvements for future events, we sent attendees an evaluation survey after the event (see supplementary file 3). The survey included seven questions with a mixture of closed and open-ended text responses.