How many facilitators do you need?
Updated July 29, 2020
At a minimum, any workshop needs two people: one to act as a facilitator and another to act as a collector. Obviously, one facilitator can't manage a room of 30 participants. So, when do you need to add additional co-facilitators?
As a general rule of thumb, you want to have one facilitator or co-facilitator for every 5-6 participants.
When you facilitate workshops with large groups of people it's common to break people into groups. Groups make large groups of participants more manageable. You will usually break participants into a handful of groups with 3-5 participants in each group.
A single facilitator can manage two groups on their own. For every group after that, a co-facilitator needs to help out.
Table 1 shows the number of facilitators, co-facilitators, and collectors needed for different numbers of workshop participants.
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