On Wednesday, 18 June 2025, we held our fifth curated networking event at our annual mid-year social. The event has always been very well-received, and over the years we’ve had several requests for the instructions. So, this year, we published a guidebook that describes how we do it – and includes access to our template docs, sheets, and forms!
We’ve added the new guide to our existing series on using virtual events to facilitate community-building, which we began back in 2020 with a crowdsourced collection of event formats. Since then, we added a curated collection of resources from around the internet, guidelines for selecting and testing new online tools to support your virtual events, and our “making a PACT” framework to help you plan out your meetings with four key elements in mind.
You can find all of these resources (and more!) on our organizing community events resource page. Read on for a brief recap of this year’s social!
About CSCCE curated networking forums
Our annual networking event takes speed networking to the next level by personally curating who participants meet over the course of a 60 minute Zoom call. To do this, we ask people to register in advance and tell us what topics they would like to connect with someone else about. After we close registration, we take a look at who’s signed up, read through their answers to the “who would you like to talk to?” question, and combine that with what we already know about our members to set up a “virtual dancecard” to guide the event.
The dancecard (aka, a tab in a Google Sheet 🙂 ) contains instructions for each participant, guiding them to a numbered breakout room where they will meet with their partner. We schedule four of these one-on-one chats, each lasting 6 minutes, with a minute in between to breath, reseat, and figure out which room to go to next!
Then, participants spend the last 15 minutes of the call in a small group chat – a breakout of 3-5 people with shared interests. In their small groups, some people may have already met in one-on-one chats, making it possible for them to introduce each other and help find commonalities or topics of mutual relevance.
With a couple of minutes left in the hour, we bring everyone back to the main room and ask them to complete a very brief feedback form so that we know how it went for them – when all of your participants are in breakout rooms it’s not always easy to tell if they’re having a good time!
“Thank you for hosting this great event! It was awesome to step outside of the box a little and hear about what folks are doing with community management in different areas/fields.” – 2025 participant
Some highlights from this year’s social
This year’s participants included 30 STEM community managers from the US, UK, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Some had been to a networking forum before, but for others it was their first time – and we got some new feedback that we’ll be keeping in mind for next year:
- Contact sharing – This year, there was a request to make it possible for connections to share their LinkedIn profiles and other contact information. To quickly facilitate this, we created a column in the dancecard and invited people to add info, if they would like, but for future events we could plan for this in advance (e.g., via digital “business cards”).
- Scaffolding questions – While unstructured conversation works well for some, for others, it can feel a little awkward to start talking to someone new. A couple of participants noted in their feedback that having some prompts to guide their conversation would be a nice touch.
- More time – OK, this one isn’t new…6 minutes goes quickly, especially if your conversation is flowing and you’ve found the topic that resonates with you both. Unfortunately, the laws of the universe make this one impossible to address without extending the length of the event (and one person did note this conundrum, adding that they’d still have had to leave after 60 minutes).
- Record low level of no-shows – If you read our new guidebook, you’ll notice that we place a particular emphasis on communicating with your guests that they should let you know if they can no longer make it after registering. That’s because “no-shows” create holes in the dancecard that have to be fixed incredibly quickly by the event hosts. This year, only four people were unable to make it without first letting us know – a record that we, as organizers, were very grateful for!
“I just love this event! I love meeting people in CSCCE that I haven’t met before and have lots of notes for considering connections to other CSCCE members in the future as questions or situations come up.” – 2025 participant
Want to run one of these events in your community?
We know that there are easier networking event formats out there, but there’s a reason we’ve stuck with this one for so long – it works! If you’d like to give it a go in your community, please download a copy of our new guidebook, peruse our tips, tricks, and templates, and let us know how it goes!
If you’re looking for additional guidance on running virtual events, we offer several Mini-workshops to support community managers in their roles as meeting facilitators. Coming up on 16 July 2025, we’re offering Designing for effective decision-making during virtual meetings – and other workshops in our “Making a PACT” series will be back in 2026. We also offer private training sessions (contact training@cscce.org for more info), and you can find all of our free resources related to organizing community events on this resource page.
Thank you!
A big thank you to everyone who joined us for this year’s social, and for sharing your thoughtful feedback and suggestions. We hope you’ll join us again next time!