Speaker 1: What's going on everybody, Will Kern from Endless Events and welcome back again to another Whiteboard Wednesday. Today we're talking about the different types of breakout rooms when it comes to the virtual space. So what are the different types of virtual breakout rooms that can happen and, you know, giving you some inspiration so that way when you're planning your virtual conference, you know exactly what type of different sessions to do. And what's great about this is when you're planning your conference and someone's looking at an agenda, imagine someone can even filter by saying, hey, I want to mainly stick in campfire sessions or I mainly want to do demos or I mainly want to do hands-on learning, whatever it may be, they can choose right within the filters. So let's dive in to the different types. So let's start with the obvious one, which is the typical breakout room sessions. You know, everybody always wants to think about the in-person typical events when you go to a breakout session, right? You have a speaker and they're speaking to a group of people and presenting some information. That's pretty typical, right? Well, it's super-duper easy. The important thing to know though is that when you add more people, it's going to become less intimate. So you kind of get that exchange when it comes to it, right? If there's a lot of questions coming on in, the presenter might not be able to get to them, all that sort of stuff. The other thing as well is that you primarily with these breakout rooms, these virtual breakout rooms, people are going to be interacting primarily through the Q&A and the chat and polling when it comes to these as well versus, you know, maybe other interactions like talking to each other and everything like that. Well, if you're interested in hearing more about people talking to each other, that's where we go into the breakout, or not the breakout, but the campfire sessions when it comes to a virtual breakout room. So these are more smaller, intimate conversations between people, you know, exchanging ideas, sharing experiences, whatever that may be. And sometimes too, you can have multiple campfire sessions, almost inside of a larger campfire session as well. And these are really best for those small, again, intimate conversations. Also as well, these were great for both the speakers to be able to share their information and get really hands-on and, not so hands-on, but really in-depth with the presenters as well. Or not the presenters, but the attendees, man. And then also as well, these are great for sponsors. You know, imagine a sponsor being able to have a captive, small audience to talk about either their product or their experience and share those sort of things as well. So check out those campfire sessions. They're really, really great for your breakout rooms. All right, then let's move on to, again, back to kind of away from communication and talking to each other to education. And let's talk about workshops, right? This is kind of like your hands-on learning educational experience, right? It's very experiential. Imagine like learning how to paint or learning how to build this thing or whatever it may be, right? And very, very hands-on and allows people to really learn by doing as well. So, you know, maybe, for example, with the typical breakout sessions, that's for your auditory and visual learners. This is for your people who learn by doing, right? And this might be more by people learning by talking and exploring ideas together. So think about it. And this is really great for virtual. Imagine, for example, you know, shipping out a bunch of art supplies to everybody and then saying, hey, we're going to teach you how to do oil painting. And then they literally get to do it as they learn it. Wouldn't that be super-duper cool? All right, then we're moving on to demonstrations, demos, right? What everybody wants to do, especially if you're in the SaaS or software world, you want to be able to show your software off, show how it works or how to work through things, right? These are super-duper educational as well. Also, these are really great for sponsors who want to show off a product as well. So for example, let's say you're, for example, a marketing software company and you're trying to show how can you use your marketing software to generate five times leads in the next quarter or whatever it may be. Man, this would be really, really cool to show off, especially for existing customers too because then the existing customers can learn tactical ways to expand their knowledge utilizing your software as well. So there's a couple different ways to be able to do breakout sessions in virtual. But before we end that one, right, and there's so many more ways this can all go, let's talk about some tips for success when it comes to virtual breakout rooms versus an in-person experience. First thing, you need to make sure that you have a moderator or an assistant for each room. And I know that sound like it seems excessive. For a lot of other conferences in person, we'd just be like, hey, here's the room. Go do your thing. You're good to go. Maybe we had someone introduce you really quick and then you were done. We want to make sure that we have one person in every room. Why is that important? A, they do a couple things. First thing they do is help moderate the Q&A, right? If there's some weird questions coming in and you don't want to distract the speaker, they can manage that sort of thing, right? If you've got a troublemaker or a bad apple in the group, they can take care of that. That's kind of the obvious thing. But what most people don't think about as well is this moderator's job as well is to help facilitate that engagement. If you have a presenter who's not very familiar with your platform and how it all works, right, that, A, that can be really, really bad. So make sure they know about your platform. But B, imagine, for example, having the moderator post questions in the chat as the person's speaking, commenting back and quoting the presenter as they talk, right? It's really a good job for this person who's a moderator or assistant in each room to be really, really engaged. And it can make or break these virtual breakout rooms. Next thing as well, separate them by topic and situations as well, right? Talk about those filters that we have over on our agenda. You know, pick out different tracks for each one to be in as well and make sure they're separated, right? So then that way, you know, for example, you don't want to put all your campfire sessions and say, hey, let's talk about sales and marketing in one campfire session. Well, it probably should be better that we have a campfire session for sales, a campfire session for marketing, all that sort of stuff as well. Next thing as well, and this is the one that I think a lot of people struggle with right now. You've got to keep them small. Before, we couldn't do a lot of small breakout rooms, right? Because you imagine if you wanted to have, you know, 400 four-person breakout rooms in a conference, you'd have to have 400 rooms to do that. Well, spinning up each of these rooms can be pretty easy other than, you know, needing a moderator slash assistant in each room. But keeping them small allows people to really interact with each other and keep it intimate and create the experience that you weren't getting before. And especially when it comes to these typical breakout rooms, people are like, hey, let's do a 400-person breakout room. Sometimes when you're in a larger room and you don't really have a voice and there's too much going on, you kind of get lost in the shuffle. And it feels more like a TV broadcast where they're just talking at you rather than you participating and engaging, right? All right. Next thing as well is always do introductions as well. Give a chance for people to be able to say who they are and say where they are as well, like, you know, especially if you are doing a typical breakout room, right? Campfire session makes sense. Everyone's going to be talking. They're going to introduce each other. And then it's obvious in these education sessions, the speakers can present and introduce themselves. But when it comes to the events, one of the things I love to do when I'm doing a virtual event is posing like an interesting, weird question that everybody feels really easy to answer at the beginning. So, you know, away from the, hey, who are you and where are you tuning in from? Stop doing that. That's like the most boring thing you can do, but instead say something like, hey, what's the last Netflix show that you binged that you're embarrassed to admit? Or hey, what'd you have for breakfast this morning, right? Doing something a little bit more unique gets people engaged. And then another thing, and I'll add as a bonus tip on this as well, then introduce a question right off the bat in the chat when the presentation or the campfire session, whatever happens next as well. So then that way people can engage and talk with each other and utilize that chat very, very easily. So there you go. There is four different types of virtual breakout room sessions and ideas that you can incorporate into your next virtual conference, as well as a bunch of tips for success as well. I hope this has been really helpful. I would love to know, have you done a unique breakout room session style virtually as well? I'd love to know in the comments down below. And if not, I'd love to know which of these is your favorite that you would like to implement. Let me know down in the comments below. I love reading your comments and I'd love to hear from you as well. My name has been Will Curran. This has been Whiteboard Wednesday. Make sure to like and subscribe, do all that stuff because that helps us out in knowing what we're doing really, really well as well. I hope you guys are having an awesome day and we'll see you next Wednesday right here on Whiteboard Wednesday. Pshh. Hi there. Welcome to another Whiteboard Wednesday. I'm Shane and today I'm going to be talking about video training.