We ran an online festival. Here’s how.
Embracing a learning by doing approach to running an online-only Festival can be… a steep learning curve! By Nicole Barling-Luke and James Oriel
A team of four, working on opposite ends of the globe pulled together a three week online Learning Festival with 40 sessions, in less than three months. Here’s how we did it, warts and all.
We hope you learn a bit about our process and how we pulled it together, the balls we dropped, and the plates we somehow kept spinning in the air. We subscribe to working in the open, we think it makes things better, so if you spot things we should have thought about or could have done to make life easier and a better experience for all involved, please tell us! Anyway, let‘s begin!
Mid-March: 2 and a bit months to go.
Our income largely came from running face to face workshops (remember them?). The pandemic wasn’t kind to that business model. So with that gone, we wanted to know if we could share our ‘greatest hits’ online. The competency framework and reflective practice and so on.
We also knew our fellows and community had something to offer. Could we experiment with some new ways of working, find out what’s useful for people and learn about online as we go?
That question became the Learning Festival.
To be free? Or not to be free?
We assumed no folks would throw money our way for a festival that we were throwing together, that we hadn’t done before and was a grand and loosely defined ‘experiment’. Back of mind were those tragi-comic news bulletins about the worst ever winter wonderlands that come round each Christmas in the UK.
And quite frankly, this wasn’t meant to be a money-spinner, but about showing up for a community who were probably stressed from trying to figure out — much like we were — what the hell we’re supposed to do now.
Rehearsing online
Alongside the festival planning, we started what became the weekly ‘How not to waste a crisis’ series. Conversations open to all with guests we felt were asking thoughtful questions about the crisis. Can governments learn the lessons of the pandemic? Use it to launch us towards something better? This was also a testing ground for rehearsing the art of online hosting. Lessons: music is good, breakout rooms are a love/hate thing, typing up all the notes takes ages but is worth it.
April: 2 months to go.
One day, one week or one month?
Nobl Academy pulled together a day of talks in late March. The Global Foresight Summit put on three days of solid webinars in early April. This was amazing diary management to get such a fantastic line-up. We are still so impressed. But the screen fatigue was real!
We decided to host something over weeks not days because we thought it was more inclusive. For everyone who couldn’t be (or couldn’t face) being on Zoom all day. Besides, with no venues to pay why not stretch these sessions out, give them space to breathe?
Plus, there’s a reason our learning programs were longer than a one day workshop. Because learning takes time. Time for reflection, to try things out and test new ideas. Three weeks felt about right. For no reason, more than a month felt too long.
Program intent
Easy to forget, but in early day pandemic times, it felt like everyone was offering up the answer. There was a lot of broadcast and what felt like not a lot of listening. There was no shortage of people offering up pre-packaged solutions. If these were unprecedented times, that felt… lazy.
We felt it more important to surround ourselves with people asking good questions while not claiming to have the right answers. That theme ran through our early ideas for sessions to design, from coaching sessions to listening circles.
When to set a date
If learning takes time, so too does arranging people’s diaries. After flirting with hosting this in May we settled on June (100% our best decision), and not just for diary management reasons. But with the rush and the discombobulation many folks were feeling, it felt right not to add another thing for people to think about. Thanks, Sam Hannah-Rankin for giving us this steer!
We had a date, now we needed a party
We made a slide deck explaining the thrust of the festival to people we hoped might lead some sessions. This evolved a lot over the next month. At this point the framing was — “we want to learn from now, to inform next”. This started as #LearningInLockdown (which we later got rid of because not everyone was/is in lockdown).
What’s in a name?
Can’t say we ever came up with a stunning, inspiring name. The Learning Festival was the ‘does was it says on the tin’ name that stuck. We briefly toyed with calling it something like ‘Lemonade’ (for when life gives you lemons). In hindsight, probably a bullet dodged. What would you have called it?
Our mailing list of about 300.
When we went from being ‘in Nesta’ to being independent of it, we had to restart the mailing list for GDPR reasons. We began with around 300 people. So it was only 300 of you that we…
Announced the Festival to!
We radiated our intent to do the festival in mid-April, 6 weeks out. We decided that yes, life is stressful, we’re grieving for all the plans and ideas we hoped we would have. All gone. So we wanted a space for “celebrations, acts of confidence, of defiance, and a chance to assert a sense of optimism and solidarity.” It’s ok to find some joy in a dark time. That’s a way of coping and making sense of it all. We hoped you’d agree.
From a landing page to a festival website
Initially, we planned to host the festival via Eventbrite and our website. There is NO WAY this would have worked. We couldn’t see a way to hack a page that would show all the events in one place and so we brought on dream team web-developer and designers (Imogen and Julian) to help us develop a website.
With 5 weeks until we opened the Festival we sent them this brief for a Festival Microsite. Scroll down to see just how many unknowns we faced at this point! In our sessions to develop the site with Imogen and Julian, we bet on our audience (you) being curious, eager to explore, international and coming back for more than one session.
We used Eventbrite because
It was easy to integrate into the web build in a short amount of time. It was good to manage the backend and waiting lists etc. It did, however, as we discovered, create a whole other platform to manage and monitor, and a whole other place for links that could (and did) go wrong. Next time, we’d cut out one of the middle platforms.
We used Zoom because
We already had a license and used it a lot for the weekly webinar series. It seemed reliable and we were comfortable using it. We didn’t consider other platforms because it felt good enough even if it wasn’t perfect. But we know there are alternatives and there’s a lot we came to wish Zoom did that it didn’t. For a start, a lot of people working in government were blocked from using it. Doh.
May: one month to go
We need… people to present!
Whether sharing their work or testing out projects or new ways of working, we needed people to lead on some sessions. We cast our net across our friends, and their friends, to see who would be interested. We thought this could have been done in April. Haha. How wrong we were!
We had an (intentionally) loose framing for the festival. Nicole was clear on the ‘vibe’ of it, but as the actual content and framing of sessions was still emerging, it was hard to make specific requests of people — it needed discussion and conversations. That takes time.
We also had no budget for this and couldn’t pay speakers. We know this can exclude people and are thinking about how to do this better.
Session design and honing a pedagogy
We built on our previous, immersive, experiential, hands-on pedagogy. Bas Leurs and Catherine Chambers helped us think about how to do this online. Our instincts still said we didn’t want people simply talking at you (though these are much easier to organise!)
Nicole wrote more about the pedagogy behind the session designs — to be interactive, not to default to one hour — that sort of thing.
In reality… as with all good design work, learning design takes time. And by this point we were slammed arranging sessions with people, seeing the website develop, setting up the backend, preparing comms and engagement plans and keeping the How not to waste a crisis series going. The lucky thing is, we were working with amazing facilitators and session hosts who brought out their expertise in this regard.
May: Three weeks to go
Time for tunnel vision
We had a call with the States of Change fellows, discussing the upcoming festival. Together, we came up with some great ideas for how we might expand our reach beyond the usual suspects. Plus session ideas that took advantage of the full three weeks and offered a depth of learning. The trouble was, we ran out of time to put these in place.
The designing, the framing, the playing had to end. We’d been planning all this through Miro and switched to a spreadsheet because Miro was still a tool we were learning and sometimes, you can’t beat a classic spreadsheet for organising. We went from seeking sessions to turning sessions away. We swapped from the very long list of how we could make this the Best. Festival. Ever to a very short list of what needs to be done immediately to get this thing functioning as a minimum viable festival.
We needed help!
The scale of what we were embarking on was dawning on us (with horror). We needed hands on deck to support project management and ‘backend’. By backend we mean the slog of arranging Zoom links, uploading copy, finding imagery and so on. Keeping the wheels on. Up to this point, Nicole was both the Producer and Production Team. The incredible Kathryn Deyell joined, and wow, did we wish she’d started earlier!
Timezone headaches
(The short version.) What we wanted was a link that would generate the time of the session wherever you were in the world. But we never cracked that. What you saw on the site was a fudge we hoped would work. Mostly it did. But we still had people arriving at sessions sometimes a day early 😬. Sorry to all of you.
Our trouble: the Eventbrite backend was all set up in Melbourne time so that we could manage it with some semblance of sanity. But this meant Eventbrite reminders were confusing and needed some mental mathematics to figure out. This was confusing because people got Eventbrite reminders in Australian Eastern time. Often this showed a different date because: datelines.
This was probably one of the most consistently annoying problems for us to solve. Timezones are hard to fully wrap your head around at the best of times. You can’t get it wrong, and it was hard to make accessible and easy for our attendees with the design functionality we had.
May: Two weeks to go.
Copywriting takes time
The session briefs were coming in. We underestimated the amount of time that was then needed to turn these into written descriptions for the web. ‘Marketing’ language (aka taking a draft and making it punchy) is an art that needs some headspace. There was also lots of signposting needed to demonstrate “what can you expect from this session”.
This was the point where we were forced to narrow right in and focus on getting week one finalised and published. We also set up a ‘coming soon’ option on the website which helped a lot, as finalising the session details was slowing us down.
We’ll share what it’s like to run the newsletter another time. But we went from writing once a month to once a week. Four times the work.
Nicole’s 30th Birthday
Nicole turned 30 at some point in this week, and only really remembers uploading session briefs to the microsite and drinking a lot of wine. Cheers!
Web design comes together
We were trying to get some images of actual people on the website. But images of people together triggered COVID anxiety (they’re not 1m/1.5m/2m apart!), and the other images we tried were people on their laptops alone, which was the reality of our festival but looked sad. We stuck with blobs.
We importantly (finally) landed the framing question that we ask on the homepage. It went from “what are you curious about” to “there’s a lot going on. We’re optimistic about what’s possible. Where shall we begin?”. This was always about asking better questions, not loudly trumpeting the answers.
Pow. Festival website launched. Hurrah!
One week to go and we only had one event live and ready to go on the website, the opening session. All other events were listed as ‘coming soon’ because the backend registration process took so long to set up, late nights notwithstanding. People seemed to like the framing and the site. Phew! The site also gave us a visual identity to spin into other things, like…
Social media things
We used Figma (like Adobe illustrator but online). And Diana Hidalgo helped us design some useful assets, for twitter, the newsletter, slide decks. We started here:
May: One week to go.
The start line is still ahead
We ran our final ‘How not to waste a crisis’ and in all honesty, we wish we’d had a clear week to get set for the festival itself. It was a great call (you can watch it here!) but the lack of breathing room meant we were tired before we’d begun!
And, breathe
Let’s just pause here for a minute and be honest about the “oh shit these are some tiiiiight deadlines”. As with most things, it happened gradually, then all at once. The pinch point for so many interconnected things (web, backend, comms) was getting the sessions finalised. Once that started to happen it was a mad dash to get it ready.
We had to remind ourselves that we were all adjusting to our individual lives in lockdown during this process; Jesper has 7-month-old twins, Brenton has kids at home, James and Nicole are dealing with sick family and sleepless nights. We’re still not sure how we actually managed to get this point.
Week one of the festival!
To glitter or not to glitter
Black Lives Matter protests grew across the world. ‘Festival’ suddenly felt… not right. It risked being shallow and performative, when what is being called for, and what is needed, is deeper and more radical shifts of power. We agreed that the ‘festival happens when it happens’, and space for sense-making felt ever more important.
Rough cuts, not rough content
We decided to upload recordings to Youtube as fast as possible. Rough cuts rather than polished edits. Incidentally, one of the most asked questions we had was ‘will the session be recorded’. The answer was mostly yes. We included this in our FAQ page, but FAQ pages probably exist because the right information isn’t where it needs to be. We should have put ‘this session will/will not be recorded’ front and centre on each session page.
The backend revealed
It’s almost embarrassing to admit the actual backend processes to some of this. We had no way of easily recording who actually came to a session. Our hack was to take screenshots of the participant list in zoom and try and match that with the email addresses that had registered. So time-consuming.
There is also no link between signing up to a session and being on our newsletter (the main way we contact people). So we couldn’t send follow-ups easily with links to slides, feedback forms or recommendations to other sessions. We’ve seen some places use you signing up for an event as a reason to add you to their mailing list. But that isn’t what people sign up for when they sign up for an event. No sneaky business here!
Operation: don’t bombard your inbox
We decided not to follow-up after each session, because with 40 sessions that would have been… a lot of emails. No-one wants that. If you’d signed up to multiple sessions you ran the risk of getting ten emails from us in two days.
That limited our ability to properly hold the learning experience. It was harder to set expectations of the sessions, invite prep work, and follow-up when sessions finished abruptly. We lacked that space between sessions. Kelly Duggan even designed a fab open Miro board to create this space. But we never had the time to do it justice.
Was the session recorded?
We also knew a lot of people signed up for the sessions for the recordings. Do we assume they then go back and check the event page or Youtube channel to find it? (Was this the right call?) Because we weren’t emailing the full list to say ‘the recording of XXX is ready’. Maybe we should, we still can!
Learning ambassadors and public debriefs
Our very generous fellow Marco Steinberg was a nominated ‘learning ambassador’ for the first week of the festival. He diligently attended multiple sessions and reported his observations back to us at the end of the first week. They were excellent.
Things like ‘we’re not hearing anything about the status-quo” & “where’s the human interaction?”.
This led to a great discussion in our weekly public debrief which gave us things to look out for in the second week. The frustration for us was we had so little bandwidth to really develop these ideas!
Week two of the festival!
Tweaking the tech
We tried a few new things this week to make the participant experience smoother. We added extra text to the reminder emails because Eventbrite was sending updates in Eastern Australia time. In Zoom we disabled ‘only authenticated users can join’ because that was proving an unnecessary faff for folks. We did our last Zoom webinar (better for huge audiences to broadcast to but not great for creating a sense of intimacy).
We used the Zoom meeting function to use breakout rooms and make sessions more intimate and participatory. However, we noticed that not everyone can or likes these smaller groups and we’d always have people drop out of a session when we went to breakout rooms. They're not for everyone, that’s ok ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Zoom gremlins
Expired links kept cropping up. We’re still confused by this as the same link that would work for one person, wouldn’t work for another. Has anyone else experienced this and know what the cause might have been?
Amazing run sheets
If you want to see some of these we’ll ask our session leads if it’s ok to share them. But some of the seemingly more emergent and ‘spontaneous’ sessions were beautifully thought through and well-designed. It takes a lot of work to make something look easy.
Festival groupies
In just a few months we’d gone from having around 300 people on our mailing list — to over 1800. Tyson and Angie’s opening talk on Indigenous thinking has 1700 views on Youtube. We’re a bit stunned.
Week three of the festival!
Endings
We’re at the end. We’re thinking about endings. How to end sessions, how to end the festival; for many of us, how to end the franticness of a crisis mindset, how to end deep structural inequalities, how to end our own complicity in them.
We were a bit better at endings before. In face to face sessions, we packed up a room, we left the building together, we’d go to the pub, then we’d travel home and we’d be debriefing the whole time. Even on a workday, you’d travel home, and there would be a buffer — however small — and some space and time to reflect.
Now we click that little red button and swoosh it’s done. Sessions have ended so abruptly. We’re missing integration time. We’re missing the commute home.
So that’s how we designed the ‘final summit’, we decided to end the festival and drive home together. To carpool and reflect on everyone’s favourite parts, catch up on the things we missed and return everyone safely home (hopefully with a sparkle in their eye!) Just as you would in a festival.
And… that’s a wrap!
This was a brain dump of what we remember happening, roughly when we think it happened. The overwhelming feeling we’re left with is one of relief, exhaustion and a need to… pause. There’s so much to reflect on, learn from and build on. But that’s for another day when we’ve had time to raise our gaze from the frantic focus of delivery. If you want to tell us how you found it, please email us, leave a comment or get us @states_change on Twitter.
