How to create breakout rooms in venues

Creating a venue requires an Enterprise account with the Events add-on.

Within venues, you can create smaller sessions, or breakout rooms, which enable the creation and facilitation of small group sessions during an event, such as a webinar or training session. 

As an organizer, you can access breakout rooms in any space within your venue and set up breakout rooms before your event goes live. There are a few ways you can set up and assign attendees to breakout rooms as described below.

To create Breakout rooms, click the Breakouts button in the action bar of any venue space. Select it to open a panel on the right-hand side with Breakouts settings.

You can drag and drop attendees to shift them between rooms. This will update the room panel and update the people search panel. When the breakout rooms open, you cannot reassign viewers to different breakout rooms.

The breakout rooms panel contains a box that enables you to decide the assignment method of the breakout rooms and the count of rooms. By default, the Assign method will be Random and the number of Rooms will be two. Each venue can support a maximum of 100 breakout rooms.

Create breakout rooms randomly

1. Select Edit in the Breakout rooms panel on the right side. 
2. The breakout rooms panel also contains a people search, where you can search for specific users or apply filters to reduce the number of returned people. All attendees should fall under the Not assigned header by default.
   
3. In the assignment method dropdown, you can select the Randomly option to generate rooms randomly. This is selected by default.
4. When you select this method, based on the count of rooms selected, it will display the estimated count of participants per room. 
5. Click on +/- beside Rooms to increase or decrease the number of rooms.
6. Select Reassign to assign participants randomly to those rooms.
   
7. Select Open rooms to open the selected number of breakout rooms.

Create breakout rooms manually

1. Select Edit in the Breakout rooms panel on the right side.
2. The breakout rooms panel also contains a people search, where you can search for specific users or apply filters to reduce the number of returned people. All attendees should fall under the Not assigned header by default.
3. If you select the Manually assignment method, you can increase or decrease the number of rooms, select multiple participants from the people search bar, and drag participants from the people search bar into one of the rooms.
   • If you drag a person from the people search bar to a room:
     • Within the people search tab, the person will be removed from the Not assigned header and appear under the room header that they are now a part of.
     • You can select multiple participants and drag them all to a room at once.
4. When hovering over the rooms, you can view the names of participants and an X. If you click on the X, the specific participant will be removed from the room and reassigned to the Not assigned header in the people search.
5. Select Open rooms to open the selected number of breakout rooms.

Create breakout rooms based on profile fields

If you have set registration for your venue, you can see an additional field under the assignment dropdown. The options should appear as By [profile field] (location, department, team, etc.).

1. Select Edit in the Breakout rooms panel on the right side.
2. The breakout rooms panel also contains a people search, where you can search for specific users or apply filters to reduce the number of returned people. All attendees should fall under the Not assigned header by default.
3. Select By [profile field] from the Assign dropdown.
   
4. Participants whose fields match each other will be placed into corresponding rooms.
5. Select Open rooms to open rooms with the participants per the field name selected.

Close breakout rooms

To close the breakout rooms:

1. Go to the right-hand side Breakout rooms panel. 
2. Select Close rooms.
   
3. All the participants will populate back to the main space of your venue within 60 seconds.  

Other features of breakout rooms

• You can rename Rooms on the left-side panel.
  • To change a room name, double-click the name field and type in a new room name.
  • When you click out of this field, ensure to update the name in the People search field too.
• Once the rooms are open, you can move from one room to another room by clicking on Join on the Breakout rooms panel on the right-hand side. 
• You can drag and drop to shift people between rooms. This will update the room panel and update the people search panel. This will not be possible once the breakout room is opened.
• In the People search section, when hovering over a participant, you will see the following options:
  • Move to new room - This will open a new popup with a list of all the rooms in it. You can click on one of these rooms to change the assignment in the left side panel and the People search window.
  • DM - This will open a direct message window with the person.
  • Ellipses - The only option in the ellipses is View Profile. If you click that you will be taken to the participant’s profile.