You’ve read it a million times over the course of the last 18 months; successful, online events all boil down to event design paired with the right tools to engage your audience. We’re firm believers that an engaged audience is one that is talking to each other, sharing ideas, and connecting with each other before, during, and after your event.

At twine, we're 100% focused on finding ways for technology to support more meaningful conversations for virtual events and remote teams. That’s why we are thrilled to officially launch our Small Groups feature this week. In just a few minutes, you’ll be able to launch a small group twine of up to 5 people per group. As an organizer, you don’t have to worry about moving people between clunky breakout rooms, making sure people aren’t getting matched with the same people, or configuring all the possible combinations of groups anymore. We’ve got you covered.

With this new feature, attendees are matched in groups of 2, 3, 4 or 5 for a timed networking session (you decide how long!). All the features you used to spark dialogue in your 1-on-1 twines (discussion questions, fixed conversation lengths, introductory video to frame the topic) are still there but now you can get more perspectives on the same topic.

We’ve been running a number of test events before launching this feature to the public and we’ve uncovered some cool use cases for small groups:

• Group Speed Networking: We ran a great friends & family event last week where over 50 people from all walks of our lives joined us to battle test the platform. We were able to connect a group of people who had never met for fun, light-hearted conversations about their favourite twine team members. With the timed conversations and question prompts, there were no awkward virtual breakout room vibes and we received amazing feedback (maybe a bit biased, but still awesome!)
  

• New Hire Onboarding: If you have new team members starting and you want them to meet their peers in an informal, friendly setting, our small groups feature is a great fit for this. In lieu of (or to complement) your more formal, onboarding meetings, try recreating the more casual lunch room, water cooler environment to offer new employees a chance to connect with their peers in shorter, more unstructured conversations - the kind that really help people get to know each other.
  

• Breakout & Group Discussions: Many events are centered around exchanging perspectives on certain topics or ideas.  Our small group features work just like our 1-on-1 tool where you can gather attendees or team members on a different platform  (Zoom, Teams, WebEx, Google Meets etc.) to present a high-level topic and then send them off into small group twines to discuss with their peers. Attendees can then share their discussions back to the larger group, or input their feedback into a collaborative document.
  

• Team Games: Sometimes you just want to have some fun! Our small groups feature is perfect for randomly dividing your attendees into teams and giving them instructions on a problem to tackle. Using the timed conversations feature, organizers are able to control how much time teams get to come up with a solution and you can keep score across multiple teams.
  

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With this feature just launching this week, we’re still exploring, experimenting and testing out use cases, so be sure to follow along here, here, and here as we share what we discover.

If you want to try a small group twine, you can set up your own space & room here to start having conversations (up to 250 attendees is free!) or book a time with our team here to find out how you can utilize small groups to increase the impact of your event or to connect your remote team.

Happy twining!