On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 we hosted our fourth annual curated networking forum for members of our community of practice. This is a regular opportunity for STEM community managers to get to know each other in a series of personalized one-on-one and small group chats – a virtual take on speed networking, if you like!
In previous years, all participants in the event have joined us on Zoom and experienced the event entirely synchronously, but this year, we welcomed our first asynchronous participant. In this blog post, we share a little more about the event, and how asynchronous networking worked for us in this pilot outing.
About the CSCCE curated networking forum
For our networking event, we invite members to register online and tell us a little about who they’d be most interested in meeting. We then take that information, along with our existing understanding of who our members are, and curate a series of short one-on-one chats in Zoom breakout rooms. We end the call by creating small groups of four-six participants who all have shared interests, work with similar communities, or who are geographically close to each other.
It’s a logistically intense session – but the intentionality behind each of the one-on-one and small group chats means that participants are more likely to leave feeling like they made meaningful, not just new, connections.
Adding the asynchronous participation option
As the CSCCE community of practice has grown (we now host close to 800 members in Slack), it has also become more international. One of our Australian members reached out to ask if they might participate asynchronously, so we decided to figure out what that would look like and how we could seamlessly integrate a new process into an already complex event.
In a nutshell, this process looked like the participant in Australia recording a very short introductory video that synchronous participants who were paired with them could watch during the networking event, drafting a form that the live participants could fill in, and then coordinating with the asynchronous participant so that they could follow up with their matches the next day.
Based on the feedback we’ve received, this approach largely worked well, and it might be interesting (and more inclusive of members in a range of time zones) in the future to run a version of the event entirely asynchronously.
When will our next networking event take place?
We love running these events, but they require a lot of behind-the-scenes preparation. We plan to host another one at next year’s mid-year social, but if you’d like more frequent networking opportunities, consider donating to CSCCE to support free programming like this!