Online speed dating for charity boards & digital trustees
A practical how-to guide
This week, Third Sector Lab hosted another in its series of Digital Trustee Matchmaking events on Zoom. The premise is that in an hour and a half long session, we bring together potential trustees from a digital background and organisations in the third sector and try to (you guessed it) match them.
Matching people in an hour and a half is a tall order. We knew this going in, and this series of sessions is pretty much a social experiment on how to get the most out of it, gathering feedback and improving as we go.
We are finding out some interesting things along the way and would love to share them with you!
What we have learned so far:
1 — The logistics & prep take time and need a dedicated person.
When we run these sessions, we have two hosts there: one to do the housekeeping, behind the scenes chat and another to share content, thoughts & facilitate. Kind of like front of house and tech crew in a theatre.
To help get people in the right headspace before the session we created a ‘running order’ google doc , and followed up with an email sent in the days immediately preceding the event.
The google doc lets people know what to expect and offers space to enter contact details and a mini-profile with links to for instance their Twitter, LinkedIn etc. We didn’t want to ask people for purpose built profiles to keep the threshold for joining as low as possible.
2 — It pays to do some maths
The running order for the event usually goes a little something like this: intros, housekeeping, talks from speakers, 4–5 breakout sessions, final thoughts & check out.
The breakout sessions are where (potentially) the magic happens. Every time we run a session we consider:
- How many people should we have per room?
- How long should each breakout session be?
- What is the ratio of people recruiting vs people applying?
- How do we maximise the number of networking opportunities for everyone?
How many people you stick in a room entirely depends on how many people actually turn up. We have found a variance of between 50–75% of registrants attending, and anywhere between 40–120 people signing up to a session. That makes it difficult to sort people into breakout rooms before the session starts, so it happens while the speakers are giving their presentation.
The length of the breakout sessions is an attempt to strike a balance between maximising the networking opportunities (i.e. how many other attendees do you get to speak to) and the time available.
We started off with a session with about 120 attendees and set up small groups (four or five people per group) in five minute breakouts. This was too short — post-event feedback and frantic resorting of rooms between sessions confirmed this. We increased it to ten minutes in our most recent session which had about 30 attendees, and had five to six people per room. This worked a little better, but feedback from attendees still indicated they wanted longer.
BUT the sessions are already an hour and a half long, and we want to keep them accessible as possible without demanding too much time out of busy days. If we make the breakouts longer, we would either;
a )— need to extend the whole session by at least half an hour (probably more to include breaks) which may make the threshold to signing up higher, or;
b) — accept that people will only get to speak to half the potential matches.
One excellent suggestion received in the feedback from yesterday is to have the attendees who are looking to recruit ‘pitch’ to the whole group, and have the breakout sessions after to allow for further questions and conversation.
3 — The mechanics of rotating people between breakout rooms require care & attention
We decided to move the people who were recruiting on to the next room when a ten minute breakout session had passed.
Because we used Zoom breakout rooms, this was a manual process. In order to make this doable, we asked people to add an F (for finding a digital trustee) or a B (for becoming a digital trustee) to their name. Once everyone was sorted into their rooms, the people with an F by their name would be moved up one room after ten minutes, so from room one into two, two into three etc, and the last room would go back up into room one.
It is useful to keep a note of who you’re moving into which room for each round to avoid confusion. See below for slick graphics on how it can be done.
4 — Getting people to mingle in an online setting is tricky. A few options:
- Use different ticket types on Eventbrite to distinguish between attendees, making pairing easier. Drawback — Zoom links accessed through this portal loose quite a lot of functionality, which has implications for accessibility. For instance, pinning a person on your gallery view is no longer possible, which is an issue for anyone who needs a sign language interpreter.
- Use an app like Twine or Whova. Drawback — Twine is yet to be launched. Clearly there is an appetite for more dynamic breakout room option than is currently available on Zoom. Whova is excellent but comes with a significant cost, whereas Zoom is free. Tickets for our events are free (funded by Catalyst), so we like to try and keep costs down.
- Use Zoom and give people the option to move freely between breakout rooms. Drawback — this could quickly become chaotic and leave less tech-savvy attendees feeling left out.
- Use Zoom and the host sets up breakout rooms once the meeting has started and moves recruiting attendees on to the next room for each breakout session. Drawback — can become difficult when people drop out mid-event and leave a room with an uneven balance of recruiters and applicants.
We decided to go with the final option because it is free, familiar and accessible.
Next time, we will probably ask the recruiting attendees to make their pitch in the main room, so that we can have the breakout sessions purely for further questions and relationship building. This time pitches were repeated in each breakout session which took up valuable time.
Our next session is planned for Monday 23rd May from 6–7pm and will be hosted in partnership with UK Black Tech. Come along if you want to be a trustee or find a trustee or even if you just want to see how this kind of thing is run.
