The Best Improv Classes In Kansas City

Breakout rooms can often be a problem for clients looking to host multiple improv classes (improv workshops) simultaneously. I had a client in Kansas City recently come to me with an event that was going to host 47 individuals and he wanted an improv based team building workshop for all 47.

Typically what I would say with 47 people is that we should go with three instructors. That's because improv workshops work best when the number of participants is somewhere in between 8 to 16 individuals for every instructor. In this instance we have 47 people so we have an opportunity to have two workshops with 16 people in them and one workshop with 15.

That means three instructors and that's the way to go with this problem most of the time. That's a great solution because that means each person taking the workshop is going to have a lot of one-on-one feedback with their individual instructor, which you wouldn't get if you ran the workshop with just one instructor and all 47 people.

However it is a problematic solution because it adds to the expenses of the workshop. The breakout rooms aren't free (of course) so you might have just had one conference room scheduled for the event with 47 people, now you need three different rooms. And sure, maybe they don't all need to be official conference rooms, but three rooms is going to cost you substantially more than one.

Plus you now have three improv instructors to pay instead of just one. Whereas the event might have cost you $2,000 if you could have gotten away with just one instructor, now it's going to run you $4,000 because you have three.

So the way around this is to present the material not as a workshop at all, but instead as an interactive lecture. Interactive lectures are a little shorter than workshops, just about 90 minutes long instead of 120 minutes. I often like clients to choose the final duration, but I give them the range of somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes. With a workshop I'd say choose between a 90 to 120 minute duration.

What's great about the lectures is the people coming into the event expect less one-on-one attention. They understand that they're going to hear someone speak but throughout this lecture they're going to be asked a lot to get up on their feet and try super silly, super fun, super educational improv comedy games.

So if that's a good way to handle what to do when you don't have enough breakout rooms and that is what I did for my client in Kansas City and it worked out great. Instead of paying $8K for the event ($4k for the improv instructors and another $4k for an additional two rooms) the client paid only $2K for a one instructor led team building interactive lecture.