So, you've been through a CGA moderator prep session, and now you just want to practice a time or two before using it in a class or other setting. Holding a practice forum is the best way to get more familiar, and it's easy as pie.

1. To schedule a forum, go to findcommonground.org and login using your moderator credentials.

2. Click the “Scheduled Forums” tab on the left.

3. in the “Scheduled Forums” tab, click the orange “Schedule New Forum.”

4. Choose the Issue Guide you want to hold a forum on.

4. This will generate a scheduling form, where you can choose the date, time and time zone.

*** Here is the most IMPORTANT thing: Please make sure to change the title of the forum to reflect that this is a PRACTICE forum, ie, not one we should ever pull the results from for use in reporting. So for example, you might change the title to: “Political Fix: KC Libraries PRACTICE forum” ***

5. Then click “Schedule a Forum” at the top. This will generate your forum invitation, which you can copy and paste into the body of the email you send out to invite participants. The automatically generated text includes a link to the forum option grid at the back of the issue guide, but we of course always recommend also sending invitees a link to purchase the full issue guide on the NIFI website.

6. Send the link to a few friends you think would be willing to practice with you, or post it on Facebook or Twitter.

7. That's it!! The day of, just make sure you've got the moderator script (or your own handy dandy moderator cheat sheet) and the issue guide open in other windows, and get practicing! If you have questions or any technical issues, you can always email Kenny McGuane (kmcguane@kettering.org), who can often respond in real-time, or very quickly thereafter.

PS: Link to latest version of moderator script, just for convenience sake: https://goo.gl/Li8yFK