With virtual events, planning time for attendees to engage with one another is important for morale and community. Adding group networking meetups to your upcoming event is a great way to let event attendees connect with each other! 

Your virtual event attendees will spend several hours a day watching informative presentations, attending live calls, and possibly chatting with speakers about various topics in either event chat boxes or an event Facebook group. But we can offer them much more!  

Plan to have a few Group Networking Meetups at your next virtual event and let your attendees make new connections and build a sense of community outside of social media.   

Adding Group Networking Meetups To Your Virtual Event

During these sessions, attendees will be randomly sorted into small breakout rooms to answer a series of pre-determined questions ranging from easy to more in-depth.

You can decide how many rooms to open, based on how many people attend each session. In general, smaller groups are easier to manage than larger groups and will allow for smaller time limits and more questions.

Make sure to greet attendees in the main room and read your welcome script. Let them know how many questions you have prepared and how long they will have to answer each question. 

Let everyone know that we will be coming back to the main group after the timer is up, and then being pushed right back into another room with different attendees for another question. 

There will not be a group discussion in the main room. I usually just talk about the next topic/prompt while I clear the rooms and get ready to push people back into groups. 

You can do whatever feels right. 

Hosting Tips & Advice

• Keep the main room open, so people who are late can still get into the session. Transfer them into a room, after explaining the networking sessions to them. 
• Keep things moving. These sessions are best with a little speed- so people don’t get bored or start new conversations in the main room- which will cause confusion and delays for the rest of the group. 
• Encourage people to exchange social handles or make a post on the attendee's Facebook Group to link up after the event.
• This session can be run with only a host, but if you also have someone available as the moderator it will help with setting up the breakout rooms and hopping around to answer questions, while always having the main room open for late arrivals. 

Remember adding group networking meetups to your upcoming events is a great way to let event attendees connect with each other! With virtual events, planning time for attendees to engage with one another is important for morale and for building community. 

So make it a priority from the start and you'll be so excited by the results and the community you've grown once it's all said and done!