Presenting Livestorm’s Much-Anticipated Breakout Rooms

If you’ve ever hosted breakout sessions, you’ll know that they provide an excellent opportunity to engage more closely with your audience. With over 1,600 requests from existing customers and prospects, we heard you loud and clear. Our team is proud to unveil our much-anticipated Breakout Rooms after several months in the making!

This exciting feature is available to all customers on the new usage-based pricing plan and will open up a host of use cases, including virtual classrooms, workshops, brainstorming sessions, and more. This means that you’ll have even more ways to engage and interact with your audience!

What are breakout rooms and why are they important?

As the name suggests, Breakout Rooms allow team members to divide their participants into smaller groups by moving them into virtual rooms. This gives hosts an opportunity to improve engagement with their participants by interacting with them in a close-knit virtual setting.

While there are many reasons to use breakout rooms for your events and meetings, we’ve zeroed in on five big ones below:

1. Give your participants the mic and spotlight. A breakout room is a great environment to give your participants a chance to speak up, be seen and most importantly, be heard.
2. Get personal. Smaller groups allow for few-to-few as opposed to few-to-many engagement between team members and participants. This will greatly facilitate Q&As and discussions.
3. Dive deeper into specific topics. Divide your breakout rooms by topic and explore each one from all angles with your participants.
4. Control the discussion of sensitive information. Need to pull a certain group or groups aside to discuss a topic privately? Breakout rooms will help you keep sensitive information within four virtual walls by allowing you to invite only those who are privy to the presentation or discussion.
5. Open up new use cases. Breakout rooms can be leveraged in myriad ways. Why limit yourself when you can now host even more use cases than before and maximize your usage of Livestorm. Here are just a few ideas: training, debates, online classes, focus groups, spotlight on speakers, workshops, networking, "speed dating", brainstorming, icebreakers, and more!

What are the features of Livestorm's Breakout Rooms?

With these key features, you’ll be able to cater to all use cases and needs for your virtual events or meetings:

Unlimited breakout rooms

The sky’s the limit for the number of rooms you want to create for your breakout sessions whether you need two groups of 10 or 10 groups of two.

Cross-device capabilitiy

Just like our platform, Livestorm's Breakout Rooms can be accessed across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Three methods of assigning participants.

The most common feedback that we got from our beta tests revealed that users needed more ways to assign participants to breakout rooms, so here are three for you:

1. Autonomous: You and your team members can allow attendees to pick for themselves which breakout room they wish to enter. We recommend this for use cases such as spotlight on individual speakers, training, and debates.
2. Manual: As the name suggests, the manual assignment method allows you and your team members to manually assign attendees to breakout rooms. This will be useful for virtual classroom settings to split up your class or if certain information needs to stay within specific breakout rooms. We recommend this for use cases such as online classes/education use cases or focus groups.
3. Automatic: If room assignment is not an issue, then you can use the automatic assignment method to let the system distribute participants (team members, guest speakers, and attendees) evenly across the rooms. We recommend this for use cases such as workshops, networking, “speed dating”, and more.

How can team members use them?

Breakout rooms can be set up by both hosts and moderators. In the current version, the event must be started before the rooms can be created and opened. Once the event has started, simply click on the Breakout Rooms app located in the Apps menu, which will open up the sidebar.

Add additional rooms as needed (a minimum of two are required) and name your rooms (optional). From there, we’ve broken down how to set everything up by assignment method below:

Autonomous

Select Autonomous from the assignation modes. If you want your attendees to be able to move between rooms, turn on “Participants can switch rooms during session”. You can also select “Include team members and guest speakers in the assignment” if you want them to get automatically get assigned. Start your breakout sessions, which will trigger a 10-second timer for your participants.

You will then enter the Breakout Room hub where you’ll see all the breakout rooms you’ve created. Each room will start to fill up as your participants choose which where they want to go. From there, you and your team members and guest speakers (if applicable) will simply need to choose the room you want to join!

Manual

Select Manual from the assignation modes. If you want your attendees to be able to move between rooms, turn on “Participants can switch rooms during session”. Start your breakout sessions, which will trigger a 10-second timer for your participants.

You will then see the Assign participants to breakout rooms modal where you can select which participants you want to assign to each of the rooms you’ve created. Once you’ve validated your selection by clicking on Assign participants, you will see the Breakout Room hub with all the breakout rooms you’ve created. From there, you and your team members and guest speakers (if applicable) will simply need to choose the room you want to join!

Automatic

Select Automatic from the assignation modes. If you want your attendees to be able to move between rooms, turn on “Participants can switch rooms during session”. Start your breakout sessions, which will trigger a 10-second timer for your participants. This will tell the platform to assign participants at random while maintaining the most even headcount possible per room.

You will then enter the Breakout Room hub where you’ll see all the breakout rooms you’ve created with participants already inside. From there, you and your team members and guest speakers (if applicable) will simply need to choose the room you want to join!

Note regarding the setting "Participants can switch rooms during session": team members and guest speakers will always be allowed to choose their own rooms, but this needs to be turned on for your attendees. For full instructions and help with using our Breakout Rooms, check out this Help Center article!

In short...

Whether you need to host online classes, workshops, or training sessions, our team has worked hard to make sure we’ve built Breakout Rooms with your feedback and needs in mind. Over time, we will continue to finesse this feature and add new elements, so stay tuned for more!

If you’re on our legacy plan and want to switch to one of our new usage-based plans to take advantage of the Breakout Rooms, all you have to do is contact our Support team at help@livestorm.co. The new plan has been designed to offer you greater flexibility and economies of scale, so why wait?

And if you’re new to Livestorm, register for a live or on-demand demo to learn how to use our video engagement platform, or sign up for a free trial to test out the Breakout Rooms for yourself!