Managing different groups is definitely one of the toughest parts when running a virtual workshop! 😅
In Butter, you can set up the breakout settings ahead — how many rooms there need to be, the duration of the breakout, and even how you want participants and co-facilitators to be assigned!
This saves you from scrambling to usher people into rooms during the session, and puts your focus back on sparking great team collaboration. 🙌 Here's all you need to know:
- Setting up a Breakout session
- Create a new Breakout
- Breakout Rooms vs. Breakout Groups
- Breakout Rooms
- Breakout Groups
- Jumping into breakout rooms
- Broadcasting messages
- Ending your breakout sessions
Setting up a Breakout session
Create a new Breakout
Choose whether you want to create the Breakout Rooms - allowing participants to move freely between rooms - or Split participants up into set groups, automagically. 🦄
Breakout Rooms vs. Breakout Groups
Breakout Rooms
Breakout Rooms are the online equivalent of allowing participants to move freely from one group to another during live sessions. 🦋
It can be created and left empty ahead of the session, then participants can be assigned during your live session — or you can choose to have them invite themselves into the room once the breakout has started. Set up a Breakout Room before your workshop to make the in-workshop setup swift and easy!
To assign participants manually, simply drag-and-drop participants into the rooms, as shown below!
You'll also want to give each breakout room a unique name and description, to ensure that participants can identify which one they belong to.
Protip: Want participants to move from room to room by themselves? Start the breakout room setup without assigning people and have people join whichever room they want on the upper-left hand side!
Breakout Groups
Breakout groups are the Butter equivalent of splitting participants up into random or predefined groupings.
It's useful for quickly and randomly splitting your participants into equal-sized groups (or pairs!) without much thought — all you need to do is save the presets ahead of the session and swiftly launch it during a workshop.
To split up, simply define the group size and everything else is done for you, as shown below!
If you're running a workshop where certain groupings need to be done (say juniors mixed with seniors or dividing the group up into departments/teams), then you can drag-and-drop participants into their respective rooms before starting a breakout — and assign the relevant co-facilitator too. 😉
Protip: Use the 'Name Groups' drop-down to select a theme and your groups will be automatically named within any theme you pick! This quickly and conveniently takes all the extra thinking out of breaking out, so you can save your brainpower for the real thinking.
Jumping into breakout rooms
As the facilitator, or co-facilitator, you can join all Breakout rooms and also have sneak peek into them. Just click the Room button in your top right and the overview of all the Rooms will open.
Protip: Want to hear what participants are saying in another room without barging in? Use the 'Peek' function! It's a handy way to see or listen into your participants without interrupting the flow of their group's conversation. It's especially useful in knowing who's getting lost of confused in an exercise — just follow the rooms where there's no sound. 😉
Broadcasting messages
At times, you'll likely have something to share instructions to everyone in your workshop during breakouts (say, when you want to offer help when they're getting confused with an activity's instruction or when time is almost up) — and that's why you have access to a channel called "All Rooms".
When sending a message in All Rooms, everyone will get a notification about the broadcast which they can open to see in the chat, but naturally not reply to.
Ending your breakout sessions
If time is up for a breakout session you've preset, you'll get notified about it — you can choose to end or extend it depending on how your participants are progressing.
If you choose to end it, it will start a 10-second countdown to help everyone wrap up and get ready to be automatically pulled out of their breakout rooms and back to the main room.
