#92 How I Planned Our CreativeMornings Volunteer Retreat
Tomorrow I am facilitating a retreat for the CreativeMornings volunteers in Baltimore. We have 12 people attending in person for four hours of planning all of our 2025 events!
This process (planning workshops) is something I've done for Fortune 500 companies, startups, and now every month for my agency clients at Affinity Collective. I thought it would be fun to bring you behind the scenes and share my process with you.
If you want to create an annual plan, run a valuable all-hands workshop day for your team, or plan a retreat for your community, this is for you!
Let’s get into it –
Facilitated workshops, when driven by data, can have HUGE impacts on your business. It creates space in the business for innovation to occur, and creates an opportunity to collect data you're not looking at regularly.
Most importantly, it fosters an environment for peak-creativity. I used this exact process at bossbabe to improve our member onboarding and increase our membership retention to over 90%.
Here's my 4-step guide to plan your retreat agenda.
Establish Your Goals
Before you design a retreat or any workshop you need to understand what the goals and outcomes are from the session. Do this first in order to decide what data you need to gather, and plan the right agenda.
You can have one simple goal, or it can be a more complex list.
The longer the list of goals, the longer your session is going to be.
Our goals for our CreativeMornings retreat were:
Reflect on CM 2024
Plan 2025 events
Build connection among our volunteers
Gather Data
In order to make data-driven decisions in the business, we need to review data in settings like workshops and retreats.
It grounds us in facts and important insights that lead to better decisions, and more innovative ideas.
For CreativeMornings we decided to send out a survey to our email list – we set a goal to get as many responses as our typical show-up rate for events and we got pretty close!
In a perfect world we would have had time to gather qualitative data by talking to community members 1:1. We have unofficial anecdotes through through chatting with the community at each event.
Here are a few questions we asked in the survey:
What do you love about CreativeMornings?
How do you decide whether or not you'll come to CreativeMornings besides availability? (multiple choice)
What kind of creative work do you do? (select all that apply)
What were your favorite events this year (select all that apply)
The questions we asked gave us a great picture of who was attending, what they care about, and what our top events were this year so that we can reverse engineer what worked well.
Design The Agenda
I like to go broad with the the high level sections, start to put slides and activities together, and then go back to detail the timing of everything.
That's just my flow – do you!
I write the agenda out in a google doc to keep handy during facilitation to make sure that I keep us to the time schedule as close as possible.
Here's my high level agenda for our CM Retreat 10:30 - 2:30
10:30 – 10:45 Breakfast / Arrival – We have food, coffee, and tea for everyone to enjoy.
10:45 – 11:00 Names + How You're Feeling + I'm In – This is a quick round-robin, and our event huddle ritual.
11:00 – 11:15 Icebreaker – We're doing a physical line graph exercise using the question "How organized is your creative process?"
11:15 – 12:00 Reflection – We're reviewing some slides reflecting on the year and then doing a group retro exercise to discuss what went well and what could use improvement.
12:00 – 12:30 Insights – I'll be presenting insights from our survey with the group and open up a few topics for discussion.
12:30 – 1:00 Scroll Break (sort of) – The volunteer who runs our social wanted some content ideas so we're doing a fun activity to find inspiration (or scroll) + it's a great time for a break.
1:00 – 2:30 Ideation + Planning – We'll be breaking into 3 groups to do individual work against 3 different prompts. Then each group will share their ideas back to the larger group. Then we'll work together on an annual plan for our 11 events in 2025.
Workshop Design
Workshop design is an art but here are a few important lessons I've learned over time:
Use slides to make it engaging & interactive – You can present insights using slides and introduce activities
Limit intense design-thinking exercises – No more than two intense workshop activities in one day. During my sprint workshops with clients day 1 is mostly dedicated to developing our client's journey map.
Create space for individual thinking & working – This helps you avoid follow the leader syndrome. Have individuals work alone, and then share with their group.
Create variation – Switch up the environment, groups, or physical materials that you're working with so that people don't get bored.
Include movement – Sitting all day isn't good for anyone, and definitely not good for creativity. Build in some short walks, stretches, and breaks where you encourage movement. My mentor, Anna, builds in mini breathwork & somatic sessions.
Set some ground rules – This is especially important in corporate. Tell attendees that they can't work on their computers that this is a hands + notebook kind of affair.
Make it fun – Build in silly activities like icebreakers that foster connection between the people in the room. I promise they'll leave saying "that didn't feel like work – it was so fun!" which is my most common feedback from my sprint workshops 😉
Do you attend your local CreativeMornings?
There are chapters in 244 cities across the world! It's a free monthly event and a great way to connect with your local creative community + there are a lot of entrepreneurs that go!
Want to do workshops with me for your business?
If you want my help facilitating a workshop for your company, reply for details! We are now booking our sprint services into Q1 which includes a research phase and bespoke workshops for YOUR business. Get in touch here.
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