10 Steps to host your live digital event
With the recent curved ball thrown our way by COVID-19, it’s safe to say that life has never been the same for all of us. In a way, we like to think that the pandemic has become an impetus driving digital transformation globally.
My name is Mindy, the community lead for a vibrant group of Data Science and AI enthusiasts and practitioners within the Singapore Public Service. As part of the Capability Development team within GovTech’s Data Science and AI Division, our work looks to upskill public officers in this domain.
Like you, we’ve had our fair share of struggles trying to “renovate” and “shift” all our physical meetups and training to a digital platform in a short turnaround time. Our regular community meet ups, Data Science Connect (DSC) was challenged with the task of going digital fully without compromising the quality experience we strive to maintain for all members.
Together with my colleagues and fellow contributors of this post, Glenn and Ian, we hope to be good digital neighbours and share some of our learning points for hosting your live digital event. As we have just concluded our first digital DSC, we are likely to tweak and improve our format over time but we hope this will help you get started.
Step 1: Do You Know Your Target Audiences?
This is one of the most fundamental questions to address since they are going to guide your selection of tools and platforms in the later steps. Ask yourself the following:
- How many attendees am I expecting?
- How many speakers am I looking to have? Do they feel comfortable being recorded digitally?
- What are the profiles of these attendees?
- Am I targeting only specific audiences? (E.g. By Invite Only event)
All these questions can be answered by calling for registration at least a month before the date of the digital event. Remember to have your event synopsis ready during registration to garner interest for sign ups.
In our case, we were expecting 350 to 400 attendees with 6 speakers in mind. And yes, we were only targeting Singapore public officers, making this an exclusive by invite only event.
Learning Point: There are a lot of useful registration tools such as Eventbrite, Google Forms and FormSG (for Singapore Public Officers only) for collection of data. Think about how you can plan and collect useful data. The insights generated will be helpful to shape the execution of your digital events later on.
Step 2: Content and Duration
Now that you have identified your target audiences, it’s time to look at planning the presentation contents around them. Here are some guidelines:
- Is the content of your digital event good for public sharing? Remember to ensure that the content is suitable for recording over the internet.
- Will the presentations require live interaction from the audiences?
- Are the topics heavy? If so, do cater for short breaks in between.
The average duration of a movie is between 120 minutes to at most 180 minutes for a block buster like the Avengers. I trust the film industry have done their research to arrive at this sweet spot for the duration of a film. Using the Avengers movie as a benchmark (yes we aim high for our productions), the recommendation is to keep your entire digital event to within 180 minutes.
On average, we allocated 30 minutes to our main segment presenters while presenters from the Quick Fire (break out) sessions were given 15 minutes of air time each. This adds up to about 120 minutes in total with an additional 5 minutes break.
Step 3: Do We Go Live “live”?
There are basically only two options for the format of a live digital event. You either
- Go live Fully OR
- Go Live Partially with prerecorded videos
We decided to go with the latter for the following reasons:
- Minimize any potential glitches that may arise from connectivity issues beyond our control.
- Allow our speakers to compose themselves when they hit pauses in the flow of the presentation (since we can always cut away these pauses during post production — which will be covered later on).
Learning Point: From the feedback given, the second option was lacking in terms of interaction for Q&A. We will be looking to integrate a live Q&A session with the speakers at the end of our next event via a video conference.
Step 4: Choose The Right Video Recording Tool that Works For You and the Speakers
With so many video recording/conferencing options available, it can be daunting to pick the right tool that works for you. Here’s a comparison below:
In the course of our own video recordings, we tried out a few tools and decided on a Zoom Pro account to take advantage of the full features. Do check out the virtual background feature which is speaker-friendly.
Learning Points: Going back to Step 1, if you are looking at a cosy meetup with less than 100 participants, it might be worthwhile to check out the free versions with basic features if the apps fit your needs. If your live event is not intended for “walk ins”, do take note to enforce tighter security features such as Enabling Waiting Rooms, Locking of Rooms, Disable Screensharing and etc where applicable.
Step 5: Conceptualise the Program Agenda and Come up with the Speakers’ Brief
By this step, you should be able to map out a program agenda for your live event. Share the agenda and format in a brief to prepare your speakers before their recording sessions. You may want to schedule a 1 hour slot with each of the speakers to cater for a technical run during the first 15 minutes. Here’s what we included in our brief:
- For consistency, a self introduction narration template requiring a few minutes of face time featuring the speaker.
- Tips on useful presenter features on the videoconferencing app.
- Reminder for speakers to send in their presentation materials prior to the recording session to ensure there is a pristine copy of the presentations.
Learning Point: Most of these videoconferencing apps display different interfaces on different internet devices. Ensure that you have tried out all interfaces to better assist the speakers with their queries where possible.
Step 6: And…Action!
This is the most important step. Get 1 or 2 more team members to sit in and record the entire session with you on their laptops. Glitches and human error can occur when you least expect it. Don’t take your chances. Here are some tips to note when sitting in for the recording:
- Ensure all participants except for the speaker are muted during the recording session.
- For the speaker, adjust the setting on the videoconferencing app to mute all alerts while the meeting is in progress.
- During the technical test run, do an actual recording to ensure that there are no issues with the video and audio output.
Learning Point: For Zoom, the video will only convert after the meeting has ended. Be sure to preempt your speakers for a short break to refresh themselves after the technical run.
Step 7: Post Production!
Warning: This is probably the most time-consuming step. Allocate at least 1 to 2 weeks for the editing. Here are the tools used by our creative designer (also known as Creative Director of DSC Productions), Glenn for his post production:
Alternatively, if you are on a shoestring budget, are constrained by both resources and know-how AND you really have to get the job done, here’s my suggestion:
Use Microsoft PowerPoint for Post Production. (For versions 2010 and above)
- Using the audio Files retrieved from the Zoom depository folder, embed them into the speakers’ presentations. Take note to trim the voice narration for the slides to ensure they are in sync. Refer to the guide here.
- Once you are done, you should be getting the final outputs as MP4 files. Remember to separate the videos by presenters and additional videos as outlined above. This will be useful for Step 9.
Step 8: Ready to Go Live!
Congrats! You are almost there. If this is for a corporate or community meet up event, I suggest you host this at a channel where you have a brand presence, keeping the content sensitivity and audiences in mind. Here are some suggestions:
- Workplace by Facebook
- YouTube
- Any other social media platforms with live hosting capabilities
The nature of our events are generally restricted to within Public Service. Hence, we will go with our private site on Workplace by Facebook with its Live function. Registrants will be added to a Secret Workplace Group where the digital event will go live.
Step 9: THE MOST IMPORTANT HACK
Use A Broadcaster Software to Go Live
All the efforts put into the above steps would be incomplete without this. We wanted greater control over the Live Streaming process. Fortunately, this is free again thanks to OBS Studio, an open source cross-platform streaming software.
OBS Setup Guide for Workplace Live
1. Download and install OBS Studio.
2. You will need the Server URL and Stream Key in order to connect Workplace to OBS Studio. To do so, start a Live Video session on your Workplace Group by clicking on More > Live Video.
3. Select the Connect tab on the top. You will find the Server URL and Stream Key here.
4. In OBS Studio, click on Setting > Stream. Choose “Custom…” from the service and input the Server URL and Stream Key.
5. Click on Setting > Output, set video bitrate to 4000Kbps and audio bitrate to 128.
6. Click on Setting > Video, set the Base Resolution to your video resolution. Set output resolution to be 1280x720 and 30FPS.
7. Create scene and add your video and music as media source. Play around with the media source properties for your need.
8. To go live, enable Studio Mode and click Start Streaming.
9. The Go Live button on Workplace will be enabled once the Start Streaming is clicked. Click the Go Live button to start streaming.
10. Click on Stop Streaming in OBS Studio to end the stream
11. Once the stream has ended, you can choose to delete the video. If you want to keep the video, just click done.
Click here to download a more comprehensive OBS Setup Guide.
Step 10: In Summary
Thank you for making it to the end of this post!
Being in a Data Science team, we embrace data in our work. From registration information to event feedback, we translate everything into data, drawing insights to identify trends or gaps not immediately visible to us. If this is the first time you are seeing this dashboard, I encourage you to find out more about visual analytics and get started in creating your own dashboards. Warning: It is pretty addictive!
Here’s a cheat sheet for you to get started on hosting your digital live event. If you come across any good learning points, remember to share them with us.
Wishing you success for your digital live events!
Signing off.
