Speaker 1: Hey everyone. After about six months I'm back with another video. Today I'll show you how to use and set up breakout rooms for your virtual events using Zoom. By using the breakout room functionality you can split your audience into smaller groups. This is great to improve audience engagement and interaction. It also helps you to build relationships with your audience even better. After all people will be less hesitant to talk in smaller groups whereas if you have a group of 50 people people will probably stay on mute and most of the talking will be done by a few individuals. We've all seen this happening and it's something that we need to avoid happening. In addition breakout rooms are very useful for virtual events where you have an external guest speaker. The external guest speaker can give a presentation in the main room and then people can go into breakout rooms for smaller discussions or workshops with a small audience. So in this video we'll first focus on enabling breakout rooms in the Zoom settings. Next I'll show you how to create a meeting room and automatically assign attendees to breakout rooms. Then I will show you how to manually add people to a breakout room after your event has started. And I will show you some of the settings that you can tweak and the features that you have available as a host to get the most out of your virtual events with breakout rooms. And then we'll conclude with some best practices regarding virtual events and breakout rooms. If you want to skip ahead to a certain section then take a look at the description of this video where you'll find timestamps. So here we are in Zoom. By the way we post a lot of videos about B2B marketing tips tricks and resources. So if you like content like that consider subscribing to this channel. I would really appreciate it. But like I said here we are in Zoom. I'm already logged in. If you want to navigate to this website just go to zoom.us and you'll go to the homepage of Zoom. Since I'm already logged in I can just click here on my account. If you are not logged in yet just sign up or sign in and then go to my account. This would be a dashboard on Zoom. Before you are able to create breakout rooms you first need to change a few settings. So we'll go to the settings on the left hand navigation panel here. And then you have to go to advanced in-meeting settings. Here you'll find the option it's the second option down for breakout rooms. So it says allow hosts to split meeting participants into separate smaller groups. And of course this is what we covered during the intro of this video. So if this is not enabled yet please go ahead and just enable it. And then there's another option down here which says allow hosts to assign participants to breakout rooms when scheduling. This is something you definitely do want to tick because when you think about it when you host a virtual event you probably you'll probably approve people right. So it's very useful to be able to pre-assign people to breakout rooms prior to the event. Which means that you don't have to do this in the event. It's going to be a huge time saver. So once you have selected this then you can set up your Zoom meeting with breakout rooms. So we'll just go back to the main main page to your profile. And then on the left hand navigation panel here you have two options really. You have meetings and webinars. Breakout rooms are only available for meetings. And when you think about it for virtual events you do want to host a meeting instead of a webinar. Because with meetings people have the chance to unmute themselves. They can turn on their camera. It's just a whole lot more personal. So always go for a meeting. So when you go to your meetings overview panel then well you're going to have to schedule a meeting. This is your virtual event. So on the right hand side here click on schedule a meeting. Now of course you can fill in all the basic details here. Just give your meeting a title or descriptions like the time, duration, time zones and so on. But when you scroll down to the meeting options you will actually see the breakout room pre-assigned meeting option here now. And before we before we change that setting this option was not available here. So this is very good to know. So when you create your breakout room and when it's for a virtual event you're already going to know who's going to attend the session right. And you're also going to know which people go into which breakout room. So here in the meeting options you basically have a couple of features. First you can create rooms. So let's do that. Let's create a few rooms. So here it says you can create up a maximum of 50 breakout rooms and assign it up to a total of 200 participants. This might depend on the on the plan that you have with Zoom. But for me I can host up to 200 participants in my breakout rooms. So there's a maximum of 50 breakout rooms which is quite a lot. That's more than you'll ever probably need. Anyway to create a new room click on a little plus icon here. And then we'll just give we'll just rename it. So let's just write some colors down green and we'll create a blue one. And then here you have the ability to already add participants. But you can really add participants in two ways. First you can just add the email addresses here. Right. So for example if I would add myself I would just type my email address and press enter. Then you can either remove this person or you can move it to a different breakout room. There's also an option to import from CSV files. And this is very useful if you have a list of let's say like 50, 60 people and you don't want to manually add them one by one to a breakout room. So ZoomMate is very easy for you. You can just go to the button right here. It says import from SCV. If you click on it you'll see a new window and it says import rooms and participants from SCV file. And basically you can download the template. So once you download this template you will get a few columns which will be the breakout room name and the email address. And then once you have filled that in you can just drag and drop your CSV file and click on upload. And then they will be added to your breakout room. I don't have the CSV file now but it's possible to do it that way. In any case once you have created your breakout rooms you can just go ahead and click on save. And now you'll be taken back to the main window and under the meeting options you have two breakout rooms. If you need to edit them you can of course. You can add more people, you can add more rooms, whatever you want. So this is how to set up your breakout room and automatically assign people to certain breakout rooms when they join your virtual event. So this has a huge advantage that you don't need to assign people one by one as they enter your virtual event and do it manually. If you do it like this you'll take the majority of the work away from you during the event. And as you're hosting the event you really don't want to do these type of administrative things. You just want to focus on other things that improve the quality of your event. So here we are on Zoom in an actual meeting. So it's just myself and Natasha in a meeting at the moment and I just want to show you the extra button that you have available in the toolbar now. So here you will see the breakout rooms button. If you click on this you have the ability to create breakout rooms as well. So if you follow the previous steps and you pre-assign people to breakout rooms and you created breakout rooms while setting up the meeting then you wouldn't have this window. You would already have the breakout rooms. But I just want to show you how to also manually create breakout rooms in Zoom. So similarly to in the backends you can create up to 50 rooms here. So you can go up to 50 but for the sake of this video let's just create two. And then you have three options. Assign automatically, manually or let participants choose room. 90% of the time I would probably not use this option because you want to assign people to a certain room and you want to avoid that everyone goes to one room and then you have a breakout room with like two participants. So anyway let's go ahead and create the breakout rooms. So as you can see we have two breakout rooms created now. Room 1 and room 2. And if you want you can of course rename them but you can also assign people to the rooms. So at this point I don't have people assigned to any breakout rooms. Let's say when you set up your meeting in the backend of Zoom and you have pre-assigned people to breakout rooms then you don't need to do this step because people would have already been assigned to a breakout room. But in case someone comes into your virtual event with another email address or whatever you still have the possibility to add people manually to a breakout room. So for example if I click on assign here I can assign the Natasha to breakout room 1. So now you see that Natasha is in breakout room 1 and of course if I have more people in my meeting I can assign them to the breakout rooms. So then you have a few buttons on the bottom here. First is the little gear icon. This is of course the settings. So there's a couple of settings. Allow participants to choose the room. So these are basically the setup settings that we just showed previously. But you can also automatically close a breakout room after a set amount of minutes. So if you select this then you can change the amount of minutes. So I could imagine this is useful on some use cases but usually I leave this unchecked. When you close a breakout room. So as a host you have the ability to close a breakout room because of course you're not going to stay in a breakout room for the entirety of the event. And then it's also very bad user experience if suddenly you pull people out of a breakout room. So with this option here. Countdown after closing breakout room. You basically give people a countdown of let's say 60 seconds or like 120 or 30 whatever you want. It's probably best to have a 60 or 120 just so that people can wrap up. But then they will see a countdown timer and then once the countdown timer goes to zero then people will be moved to the main room automatically. Once you want to start the breakout room. So let's say you had like a guest speaker at your event right. The session is over and the next thing on the agenda are workshops. So then you can open the breakout rooms by clicking on this button here. So only the host or a co-host can do this. So of course normal attendees wouldn't be able to see this option. So you click on open all rooms. And as you see on the top here it says all participants have been invited to join the breakout rooms. So Natasha in this case she received a message on her computer which says you've been invited to join a certain breakout room. Right and then Natasha has the ability to go into this breakout room. As a host you can broadcast a message to everyone. So let's say you have ten breakout rooms and as a host you want to send a message to the people to see how it's going or to say that you know the breakout rooms are going to close in five minutes or whatever you have that possibility. So if you click on this button right here broadcast message to all. Then you can type a message here and broadcast it. So everyone everyone in your zoom meeting or your virtual event will see this message and it doesn't matter in which room they are. So they could be in room one or in room two. Of course it's also possible to to move people to another breakout room. So let's say you have a lot of breakout rooms. Let's say you have ten breakout rooms and you want to move people to certain breakout rooms. Then my advice would be to only move the host to a different breakout room and let the majority of the people stay in certain breakout rooms. But let's say I want to move Natasha to a breakout room two. If I hover over a name click on move to. I can move her to room two and again she'll get the message that she's invited to join this breakout room. She will have to accept it and once she does she'll be moved to that room. So now let's say we're done with the breakout rooms. We did a workshop or whatever. We can go ahead and close all rooms and if you click on this red button here close all rooms. Basically everyone will go back to the main to the main session. So let's click on that and now once I clicked on this every person will have been given 60 seconds to wrap up and in 60 seconds they'll be moved to the main breakout rooms. I can do this again. I can click on open all rooms again and I can move people to breakout rooms again if I want. But in this case I'm not going to do this but if you want to have that for your virtual events you have the ability to open breakout rooms multiple times during an event. There's no limit on this. So I'm just going to open the rooms again to show you something that you can do as a host. For example I'm the host of this meeting and let's say I want to go to room two. I can just hover over room two and go to the right side here click join. Then I get another message join room two and of course I want to do that and then I'll be joining breakout room two. So then I can see if everything is going well. So again this is just like a normal zoom interface and then on the bottom right here I have the ability to leave the breakout room. But everyone can do this so your attendees can also just leave a breakout room if they want. But let's say now I've spoken in room two and I want to go to room one. Just the same process I can go to room one. But then if I want to go back to the main room I can just click leave room and I'll be taken to the main session if I click on leave breakout room. So I've hosted loads of virtual events by now and definitely have some lessons learned. So let's go over some best practices. Each breakout room needs to have a dedicated host. Before sending your audience to a breakout room make sure that you have announced who the hosts are. This is a better user experience and it makes people feel more comfortable. Sometimes there will be technical difficulties. So always make sure that there is a person in the main room even when the rest of the audience is in the breakout rooms. People can always leave a breakout room and then they will be placed into the main room. If there's no one in the main room then you risk losing your audience and of course no one wants this. Another best practice is to not over complicate things. Keep things as simple as possible. This will streamline the experience and it eliminates the risk of things going wrong. For example keep the same group of people for breakout rooms. Don't try to create multiple breakout groups as this will be a lot of manual work during the live event and things are bound to go south. A good structure for a virtual event with breakout rooms is to first have the main session and then go into breakout rooms and then conclude in the main session again. And finally keep the audience size in breakout rooms to a maximum of 10 people. The point of a breakout room is that people have a chance to chat with each other. If you have a breakout room with a large audience size you might as well keep everyone in the main room. Well there you have it. I hope this was helpful for you and if it was I really appreciate it if you could like this video and subscribe to my channel if you like this type of content. Thank you for watching and I will see you next time.