Picture your last big virtual event. Fifty people on the call, one person talking, and a chat window that’s gone quiet except for a stray emoji. Nobody’s being rude. They’re just watching.
That’s the gap breakout rooms are built to close. A large virtual event can teach a room full of people at the same time, but it can’t make forty strangers feel like they belong in it. Splitting that big room into smaller ones is often the only thing that does.
Here’s how to use breakout rooms in virtual events to get people actually talking instead of watching, the setup that keeps a session from falling flat, and how to pull it off inside Circle, which doesn’t build breakout rooms in the way Zoom does.
Why Use Breakout Rooms in Virtual Events?
Breakout rooms in virtual events split one big group into smaller conversations, and smaller groups are where people actually participate instead of just watching.
Think of a breakout room as a mini conference happening inside your larger event. Instead of fifty people watching one speaker, you get five or six people actually talking to each other, and that shift changes what your event does for the people in it.
The first thing it fixes is the crowd problem. In a big group, most people never say a word. In a room of five, everyone gets a turn, and getting a turn is what makes someone feel like they were actually at the event instead of just watching it happen. It’s also what keeps people around afterward: participants who get to talk are more likely to remember what they learned and walk away satisfied.
Breakout rooms also let you stop treating your whole audience like one audience. A professional development session can put beginners in one room and advanced participants in another, so nobody sits through content that’s either over their head or beneath them.
They do real work for networking too. It’s a lot easier to exchange contact information and build an actual connection with five people than with fifty, and those smaller conversations are usually where the word of mouth that fills your next event actually starts. That’s part of why an event built around real conversation does more for a community than another week of posts.
And they’re the right setting for anything collaborative: brainstorms, case studies, team building exercises. A room of five has to contribute to solve a problem together, or the room just goes quiet.
How Do You Run a Breakout Room Session That Works?
Give each room one objective, put a facilitator in it, time it to the format, and bring everyone back together to debrief. Skip any one of these and the room stalls.
Give Each Room One Objective
Before you open a single room, decide what you want the people inside it to walk away with. A training session might aim for participants practicing a new skill. A brainstorm might aim for a set number of new ideas. Whatever it is, name it, because a room without an objective turns into small talk fast.
- Write the objective in one sentence before you build the room
- Send any materials or instructions participants need in advance, so nobody’s reading a document for the first time mid-session
- Give the room a reason to exist, not just a headcount to hit
Put a Facilitator in Every Room
This is the one I’d tell you not to skip if I could only tell you one thing. A facilitator keeps the group on track, draws out the quieter people, and manages anyone taking up more than their share of airtime.
Facilitators need to walk in prepared, not just present. Give them questions or prompts ahead of time so they’re not improvising the whole session, and train them the same way you’d train anyone else running a piece of your event. This is one lever inside the engagement fundamentals already doing the heavy lifting in your community, not a replacement for them.
Time It for the Format
Too short and nobody gets past introductions. Too long and the room loses focus. A quick discussion or activity fits comfortably into 15 to 20 minutes. A more in-depth workshop usually needs 45 to 60. Tell participants the timeframe up front and use a visible timer so the facilitator isn’t the only one watching the clock.
Debrief as a Full Group
Bring everyone back together once the rooms close. Have each group share a takeaway, name a common theme, or reflect on what came up. This is where the value of the breakout reaches the people who weren’t in that specific room, and it’s what makes the whole exercise feel like it added up to something instead of five separate side conversations.
What Breakout Room Activities Are Worth Trying?
Icebreakers, case studies, hands-on skill building, and casual social rooms all work in breakout format. The right one depends on what you want the room to do.
Icebreakers for Networking Events
A quick icebreaker like Two Truths and a Lie, where each person shares two true statements and one false one and the group guesses which is the lie, gets people comfortable fast. It works especially well at the start of a networking-focused event.
Case Studies for Critical Thinking
Hand each room a different scenario and ask them to work through it together. A business strategy workshop, for example, can give each breakout a different business situation and ask the group to build a plan. Applying knowledge to something concrete leads to deeper learning than a lecture ever will.
Hands-On Skill Building
Smaller rooms are the right setting for actually practicing something, not just hearing about it. A digital marketing workshop might have each room work on a piece of a campaign, a social post, a headline, a content plan, while a facilitator moves between rooms to give feedback in real time.
Casual and Social Rooms
Not every breakout has to be about work. Theme a few rooms around something social: a coffee chat, a happy hour, a room for book lovers, a room for fitness enthusiasts trading workout tips. Casual rooms build the kind of relationship that brings someone back to your next event, even without a formal agenda.
Feedback rounds work well in breakout format too. After a main session, split people into rooms to talk through what landed and what didn’t, then have each group report back. People are more candid in a room of five than in a chat box in front of fifty.
How Do You Run Breakout Rooms in Circle?
Circle doesn’t build breakout rooms the way Zoom does, but linking text and event spaces together gets you a working version, backed by a tech lead and a practice run.
I want to be straight with you here: Circle doesn’t have true breakout rooms. There’s no button that splits your live room into five smaller ones automatically. What you can build instead is a workaround using linked text and separate event spaces, and once you know how to set it up, it holds up well. I also put together a video walkthrough of the setup, because this is the piece that trips people up the most, and it’s easier to show than to describe.
Spend time in Circle’s settings before your event, not during it. Know how to create separate event spaces and link between them, because familiarity with the platform is what lets you troubleshoot fast when something doesn’t behave the way you expected on the day. The same workaround shows up when you’re setting up a live workshop inside Circle, so getting comfortable with it here pays off more than once.
Put a technical support person on your team specifically for this. Glitches happen, and having someone ready to fix them, and to walk members through getting from the main session to their breakout room and back, keeps small problems from turning into a stalled event. An SOS chat set up just for the event gives both your tech team and your attendees one place to land when something goes sideways.
Run a full practice before the real thing. Simulate the whole process, from opening the main room to moving people into breakouts to bringing them back, with your facilitators and tech support in the room so everyone’s comfortable with their role before it counts. Give participants a getting started space with the top FAQs answered too, so they’re focused on the conversation instead of figuring out how to find it.
Try This Prompt
This one turns a vague breakout room idea into a facilitator guide you can actually hand someone.
“I’m hosting a virtual event for [type of community]. My breakout room objective is [what you want participants to walk away with]. Here’s what I know about the group: [size, experience level, what they’re there for]. Based on the approach in this post, draft me 4 to 6 facilitator discussion questions and a short welcome script my room leads can use to open the session. Give me the output as a one page facilitator guide.”
It drafts the questions and the script. You still decide what this particular room needs to hear. If you want to pressure test the plan before you run it, that’s a lot of what happens inside coCreator Society.
The Room Is What People Remember
Nobody leaves a virtual event talking about how many people were logged in. They leave talking about the conversation they had, the person they met, the room where they actually said something out loud.
That’s what breakout rooms protect: not attendance, not watch time, the actual experience of being somewhere with other people instead of in front of a screen alone. Get that part right and the rest of your event gets to ride along.
Plan the objective, put a real facilitator in the room, and give it enough time to matter. The technology is the easy part once you’ve done it once. The room is what people remember.
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More Like This
Listen: How to Host a Workshop in Circle. The same Circle workaround, covered in full inside a live workshop setup.
Listen: Why You Should Host Events for Your Community. The event formats breakout rooms are built to serve.
Listen: Why Your Last Workshop Flopped (And How to Fix It Next Time). What happens when a session doesn’t land, breakout rooms included.
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