Creating a Community for Virtual Facilitators: How Coffee Chats Helped Us Find Our People
Friday Coffee Chats have been an opportunity for us to practice virtual facilitation while connecting with the broader facilitation community about their needs during the transition to online meetings. Almost by accident, it became an excellent tool for marketing our offers and workshopping new content in a low-pressure environment. While the Coffee Chats model might not work for everyone, finding consistent ways to connect with a community is an essential step to meeting their needs.
After a year of learning about what works and doesn’t work with digital marketing, Coffee Chats were a win. Read on to see what turned out to be such a good learning experience for both ourselves and the community.
The Story of Coffee Chats
When the pandemic began, I and many others lost work and fell into a world of virtual facilitation tools we had little to no experience using. I wasn't feeling particularly confident facilitating with tools like Zoom, MURAL and Google Docs. Initially, Coffee Chats were a way for me to practice facilitating using these tools and bring people together in the process. I created this space for facilitators to bring issues to the table and workshop them with the community.
Coffee Chats have always utilized an Open Space style. We brainstorm topics to discuss as a group, use the whiteboard tool MURAL to capture the ideas and work through as many of them as possible. After, I make a summary video and send out an email with the key resources.
Over time, Coffee Chats became an opportunity to build a brand and a presence for Dancing with Markers. At first, I was hesitant to promote myself until a wise member of the group told me that promoting myself was an expectation. I started including announcements and found that the smaller, more intimate setting was ideal for connecting with potential audiences. If I reached two or five people through Coffee Chats, those two to five people were more likely to take action after hearing me talk through an offering instead of just reading about it somewhere online.
Coffee Chats began as a free event, but eventually, I started charging a nominal fee. It allows me to cap the number of attendees, so it stays an intimate conversation, and it encourages people to commit to attendance and prevent no-shows. I give attendees a discount code for future events as an incentive to keep their attendance going.
Want the discount? Join your first chat!
We’re doing Coffee Chats every other week now, and I’m trying to incorporate some focused conversations and bring in specialists, just to mix it up. Fewer people attend now than when they started. I interpret that drop as an indication that there’s less need for open practice groups, as many people now feel comfortable with virtual facilitation. People still enjoy the time, but we can make it more valuable by exploring focused topics and new virtual facilitation tools.
We also started our Facebook group to provide a conversation forum between Coffee Chats. We want it to be an open group space, so we are still working on finding more ways to encourage others to take advantage of the platform and share their own content and resources.
The Impact of Coffee Chats
As a facilitator, Coffee Chats has made me fully confident in virtual facilitation because it forced me to practice where it’s safe. One of the ground rules of Coffee Chats is: this is a time for things to break. When something breaks, we celebrate that and talk about what we learned, and others who have been able to come and practice in this space benefit too.
I feel more connected to my audience and clearer on who I can serve. Having face-to-face time with my audience lets us address their most pressing concerns together.
For example, now that we’re getting into the hybrid meeting space, I’ve learned what concerns my audience has, and I have been able to put those concerns into the eBook that I published.
Recently, someone came in and said, “I need tools to facilitate online team-building,” and we tapped into that knowledge that was in the room and probably gave her a semester’s worth of content from that. She was overjoyed, and we loved being able to help and learn new things from each other.
I’m able to quickly generate content that they are interested in through blogs and online products, resulting in many lasting resources that they can come back to or find after the fact. We’ve done a webinar on event COVID safety with a COVID compliance officer and one on hybrid technology with a subject matter expert in hybrid meeting technology. Both webinars and other resources are now a part of our blog, and our YouTube channel features a playlist of recaps videos. Coffee Chat is producing a knowledge repository that will live on past the live chats.
The Future of Coffee Chats
Coffee Chats will continue to evolve, and we’ll continue to do one or two regular ones per month and one special edition every month or so. They will continue to be on Fridays and 8:00 AM, and at this point, I have not found a working solution for bringing my West Coasters in. If someone wants to create their own West Coast virtual facilitation chat using a similar or different model, I certainly don’t feel like I own a patent on the idea.
If you’re thinking about creating a mastermind or other community of practice, I like the Open Space model; it’s a light lift with a bit of front-end prep work and back-end knowledge archive creation. Mastermind groups often have a membership, and I like the come-and-go model because it allows for flexibility and for people to come and pop in whenever it’s right for them.
TRY THIS: What’s your “Coffee Chat?” Brainstorm (5 MINS)
1) What is something you want to learn that is related to your professional growth? Be as specific as possible.
Example: As a female professional and growing leader, I’d like to learn how to adjust my leadership style to meet the needs of my team and direct reports.
2) Who else may be interested in that topic?
Example: I have a few colleagues, but there might be others interested beyond them.
3) What is something you can do regularly to bring people together around this topic?
Example: I could host a 30-minute lunch session. Each week someone new presents a challenge, and we all munch and give that person feedback.
4) If you did this, what would it enable you to do?
Example: I would learn ways to grow as a leader and develop a cohort of mentors. I might even produce some articles or blogs that I can highlight on my LinkedIn profile. Who knows? Maybe down the road, I’ll launch a coaching program for female leaders!
5) What would a small pilot version look like?
Example: I’ll try this next week with 2-3 close colleagues and get their feedback.
6) What’s your next step?
Example: Emailing my colleagues! Let’s do this!
INTERESTED IN JOINING AN UPCOMING COFFEE CHAT? RESERVE YOUR SPOT ON EVENTBRITE.
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