In the digital age, the way we work, learn, and interact has dramatically changed. Virtual collaboration tools have become a necessity, and among them, Butter.us has emerged as a platform that promises to make online collaboration as smooth as its namesake. This post delves into the workings of Butter its features, and how it can revolutionize the way we conduct virtual meetings, workshops, and training sessions.
What is Butter?
Butter is a virtual collaboration platform designed to bring structure, energy, and joy to your online interactions. Unlike traditional video conferencing tools, which are primarily designed for conversations, Butter is built to facilitate planning, running, and recapping engaging and interactive collaborative sessions. The platform seeks to empower facilitators, moderators, and hosts by providing them with a suite of tools to engage participants, all in one place.
How does it work?
At its core, Butter focuses on three aspects: planning, engagement, and recap.
Planning: Butter allows users to prepare sessions that practically run themselves. It encourages structured sessions with a time-boxed agenda, pre-loaded tools, and a reusable team library, leading to better outcomes.
Engagement: The platform goes beyond the typical meeting format by incorporating features designed to keep participants engaged. These include emoji reactions, sound effects, a hand-raise queue, polls, flashcards, music, and GIFs. This interactive environment combats meeting fatigue and fosters more dynamic and engaging sessions.
Recap: Butter also places emphasis on ensuring that the outcomes and takeaways of a session are easily accessible. It allows users to summarize sessions and capture outcomes in seconds, with options to access and share recordings, personal notes, chat logs, and poll results from any session through a single dashboard.
What sessions can Butter facilitate?
Butter is not built for those meetings that "could have been an email". Instead, it is a tool for facilitating highly-collaborative sessions like workshops, training sessions, bootcamps, courses, events, interactive webinars, social events, or any other session where you need to keep people energized and productive. While you can use Butter for everyday meetings, it’s designed to be much more than a standard meeting tool.
Key features
Butter integrates various facilitation tools into one window, eliminating the need to juggle multiple apps and tools during a session. You can access polls, flashcards, videos, music, Miro, MURAL, Google Docs, and more, all within the Butter window, keeping everyone focused on one window and one outcome.
It also provides a workspace for all your team’s sessions. This workspace is a place to create rooms, share templates, and access recaps, which helps save on session setup time, create team-wide consistency, and keep track of your team’s sessions.
In addition, Butter comes with community-made agendas, activitys, and tool templates that users can add to their Butter library in seconds. This feature is handy for those who don’t want to start from scratch and would rather use proven templates to plan their sessions.
Pricing
Butter.us offers a free plan that allows you to run group sessions for up to 45 minutes with as many as 25 participants. One-on-one sessions are unlimited and free.
Wrapping up
Butter stands out in the crowded market of online collaboration tools with its focus on facilitation and engagement. Its unique features, user-friendly interface, and affordability make it a promising solution for anyone looking to transform their virtual meetings into interactive, productive, and fun sessions.
Regardless of whether you're a teacher aiming to make your online classes more engaging, a project manager looking to make team meetings more productive, or an event host trying to bring energy to a virtual social event, Butter could be the tool you need to smooth out your online interactions.