Hey Facilitators,
Welcome to May! Has it been absolutely warm and beautiful and then suddenly cold and dark where you are? We think that’s just so typically May.
We had a busy April (we’ll catch you up on all the goings-on) and are excited to connect with you this month. Let’s jump right into it!
📆 FC Community Events Coming Up This Month!
🦈 Become a Card Shark - Tuesday, May 10 @ 4-5 PM ET
Card Sharks is the session designed to help you get the most out of your deck of Facilitator Cards. In this 60-minute session, you will:
- Learn new cards and combinations you can easily implement in your next workshop
- Figure out how to find the cards you need (and not get overwhelmed by the rest!)
- Work through real-life scenarios to figure out a plan with your Facilitator Cards
It’s totally free, you’ll meet other wonderful facilitators in our community, and if you’ve got your deck of Facilitator Cards then you can RSVP right here!
And if you don’t have a deck yet, if you order them today they may still arrive in time for this month’s Card Sharks, and if not, they will for next! Use code CARDSHARK for 10% off your deck.
🤸 Facilitator Cards Playground - Wednesday, May 18 @ 12-1 PM ET
The Playground is the place to:
- Learn new activities (by getting to do them from the participant seat!)
- Discuss and dissect how the activities work
- Figure out ways we can integrate these activities into our own sessions
Every month we do two processes from the Facilitator Cards deck, and we all walk away with fresh ideas and feeling re-inspired to try new things! If you want to get a sense of the event, watch last month’s here. RSVP for this month’s here (only 15 spots left!).
📸 From the Insta
We’re hella active on Instagram these days so if you’re not following us over there, we’d love you to! We share pro-tips, icebreaker ideas, prompts for the cards, and more.
PRO TIPS!
✅ Day-Of Facilitator Checklist
🔥 Three Things To Know About Zoom Breakout Rooms
📝 Our Community’s Best Advice About Flip Charts
ICEBREAKER IDEAS
💭 How to use the “I Know” vs. “I Wonder” Facilitator Card as an Icebreaker
🕳 Five Fill In The Gap Icebreakers to Open Your Meetings With!
👀 In Case You Missed It
◻️ Zoom’s New Whiteboard - a big new update that aims to give MURAL and Miro a run for their money. But! It’s not quite ready for action. We posted our first reaction reel on Instagram to share why. But if you do want to see it in action, our friend Jan did a livestream about it last week that you can watch here.
🌍 April was Earth Month - (as every month should be) and we wanted to share what we do here at Facilitator Cards to help give back to this wonderful planet of ours. One of the things we do is plant trees for every deck sold to 10x offset our carbon emissions. See our Insta post about our current contributions & stats, and read more about Mossy Earth (and our philosophy/why we partnered with them) on the blog.
💪 Analogizing is a Powerful Tool - especially when you’re entering a conversation on topics that people have discussed many times before (like leadership, teamwork, training—y’know, like we do as facilitators!). In this blog post we get into the analogizing process and go over how we use it as both an icebreaker and a conversation starter, plus give you all our best tips and tricks for it. You can also watch our 60-second tutorial to get up to speed on what this process is all about.
🔴 From the YouTube!
We’re posting regularly on our YouTube channel. Tune in Tuesdays at 2pm ET for our Livestreams and Wednesdays we post new videos all about the little structures that make a big difference before, during, and after your sessions. Join in the fun and subscribe here!
Here’s what we shared about in April:
📈 How To Increase Participation This might be the most knowledge-packed video we’ve ever made. What are the three things that increase participation in any session no matter what you’re teaching? Great question, we’d love to tell you…
🤓 The Best (free) Facilitator Activity Resources - This is a round-up of three great places to learn facilitator activities on the web! All of them are free (or freemium) and are some of the places we go to get inspired.
👏 Favorite Zoom Features for Virtual Facilitation - Spruce up your Zooms and put a little novelty into your next session with our favorite Zoom features you may not know about.
🎨 MURAL for Virtual Facilitation - MURAL is one of our favorite platforms for virtual facilitation (and we use it all the time in running the business side of Facilitator Cards!). See what we do with it and why we love to use it in this video.
🤝 Using AhaSlides & Zoom Together - If you watched our video on AhaSlides and why we love it and now you’re thinking, “I wanna try this in my next Zoom…how do I do that?” that’s what this video is for!
🤩 For Fun!
📺 The importance of self-differentiation for facilitators (with Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin)
Years ago, before Facilitator Cards, Meg did a series of interviews with facilitators for her then-project FacilitatingXYZ. This quick 1-minute clip is about why it’s important to differentiate yourself as a facilitator from your participants, and it’s great!
🃏 16 facilitation card decks to inspire your next workshop
If you are someone who appreciates a good card deck to help you inspire your workshops, Butter recently featured us in a round-up of facilitation card decks. A few of our faves were not on the list, so we wanted to shout out We! Connect Cards and Climer Cards as well!
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Alrighty then, that is going to do it for this month. Thanks for being part of our community, and until next time, happy facilitating!
Meg & the Facilitator Cards Team
p.s. if you read all the way here, give yourself a pat on the back and go explore some of those tabs you opened up while reading this (or if you’re like us, you’ll leave ‘em open until you lose them in the Great Tab Crash of May 2k22 and declare Tab Bankruptcy). Either way, happy exploring!