3 reasons why you shouldn't read Magazine alone and how 3 min of networking can change your life

Launch Read-Party Highs, Noooos and Lessons Learned

How NOT to run Zoom Breakout Rooms

Yesterday evening we held a launch read party for the first issue of our new Businesses Worth Spreading Magazine.

It was a bold move, on many levels. None of us had ever attended a read party for anything, but we’ve seen plenty of watch parties, and figured it would be fun, and interesting.

The magazine issue itself is our Minimum Viable Product prototype of a completely new type of interactive magazine, one that has been cocreated with the readers from inception. It is totally Human and Value driven. We used Zoom and Mural to run a networking discovery session, where readers interviewed each other to gather information about what they collectively wanted from the magazine. We used Canva to create the magazine live in a semi-open environment, with contributors being invited in to co-create their own articles, and to proofread, comment on and build up the rest of the magazine.

So a launch read party with those contributors being present to speak with the readers, in Zoom, seemed like an excellent, fun way to launch the magazine. 

The Noooos

We’ve run so many Zoom meetings now, it’s easy to think we know all the things that can go wrong, and have contingencies in place to deal with them.

But last night, we ‘discovered’ a completely new way to screw up a live event, using breakout rooms.

The idea was that each contributor would have their own room, and guests would be able to join the contributor they wanted to speak with, read their article and discuss it. It seemed simple enough.

Unfortunately, the rooms were created and the contributors assigned to them using their email addresses. What we didn’t realise until it was too late, was that doing it that way meant ONLY the assigned contributors could see their rooms..... and than they all were gone

And so when the time came, the contributors all left for their rooms and sat alone, beginning to doubt themselves as time went on, while Christophe and I scrambled to find a way to assign each participant, one by one, to their chosen rooms.

This would have been much easier if I had been able to see the participants and chat, but as I was sharing my screen, and working with 3 different screens that suddenly become one. I was working blind.

The Highs

Fortunately, one of the skills we teach is how to deal with the unexpected and FIGURE things out, and between us, we were able to get everyone assigned to a room. We are always saying you have to be okay with the chaos, it’s part of the process. I must admit, though, I sweated more last night than I have in a long time.

Yet for all the tech setup headaches, we learned a lot, and there were also some really powerful highs during the event.

When we brought participants back into the main room after their chats with the authors, we asked for feedback on how the chats had gone.

We had three awesome feedbacks and 3 REASONS WHY you shouldn't read your magazine alone.

1. You are not alone: One reader said while reading “It Sucks to Be Stuck” by Karen Heimlicher, that he realised he was not alone and that we all go through similar challenges in our own ways, only the details are different.
2. Being inspired and expand and grow: Ivica Kuzmic, author of “Why Should I Care About Blockchain?” said that it was interesting to meet people with similar interests and hear their points of view, and that the conversation had given him an idea for his next column article in the next issue.
3. Bringing the article to life: Francois said "that being able to read the article with the author present, ask the questions that came to mind and hear the answers brought the article to life".

We got a lot of positive feedback about the reading and meeting experience. We then also ran two rounds of carousel speed networking, which is always popular. Only this time, the conversations had a slight twist, as participants were told to introduce themselves in one minute each and then share their takeaways from the articles they had read and discuss them for two minutes.

When the networking rounds were completed, and we asked for feedback, one participant told us he had landed in the room with someone who worked at the company he had applied to work at, and another that he had been connected with someone he had been meaning to reach out to for some time. Two amazing connections made in six minutes. If that’s what can happen in one hour (forty minutes if you discount the time spent trying to organize breakout rooms) just think what can happen in twelve hours spread across six days (the time of an Inspirathon*).

Lessons Learned

So, what were some of the lessons learned?

1. Don’t assign people to breakout rooms in Zoom using email addresses unless you have everyone’s email addresses and don’t want them to move between rooms.
2. If the energy is high and people are enjoying themselves, they won’t mind (or even notice) the tech snaffus, so just keep going.
3. Not everyone who accepts an event invite on LinkedIn will actually sign up to the event (we already knew this from previous events, but it bears repeating) and not everyone who registers will attend (a few emails with the event links went astray.) 
4. People love networking and meeting new people in a fun environment far more than they enjoy sending outreach messages or trying to build those connections in a vacuum. Again, this isn’t really a new lesson learned but a powerful reminder of why we do these events.

Our next event will be a pre-Inspirathon networking/weinvolve’s first birthday celebration. No doubt it will be a lot of fun and throw up some new learning and challenges. One thing is for sure, since we at weinvolve don’t do business as usual, it’s bound to have a twist or two along the way.

Why not come and join us, and make some new neuronatwork connections?

*Inspirathon is what needs to happen before Hackathon. So, how do you get inspired and make your idea real? How do you get the outside-in/inside out perspective and validate your business idea using a speedy process that makes sense not only for you, but for the people that it adds value for? So that they actually want to pay for you what you deliver, so it makes sense for you to deliver.

Inspirathon is a new kind of online event, something that blends our crowdsulting, hands-on learning experience with the competitive element of a hackathon, and aims to produce real-world value-added prototypes by the end of the week.

If that sounds like fun, or of it intrigues you, I invite you to join us at our next Inspirathon. https://page.weinvolve.ch/6D_Inspirathon