in just a moment there should be a little icon in your upper left corner that says that it's streaming to otter AI, and that is doing an AI, live transcript of today's session. I want to invite you to rename yourself using your preferred pronouns. If you need help with that you can ping me. I also wanted to just highlight, I know we've all been doing zoom for a while now, but I wanted to highlight two quick things that I find really helpful. One is the hide self view. So if you like me get a little distracted by yourself in the view. If you hover over your own square, hit the dot dot dot, you can select hide self view. And that way we can still see you but you don't have to see yourself, which I find helpful if that's helpful for anyone else. And then the other thing I want to highlight as you can see there's a screen sharing right now. And there's a line between where the participants are, and where the screen sharing is, if you hover over that line you can you can kind of toggle that a little so that helps you know if you want to see the screen or if you want to see the participants more, just wanted to highlight those two quick zoom things that I've personally found helpful. And then the other bit of housekeeping for right now is that we are going to record this session so starting now I'm recording this session. And this will be recorded and uploaded on to wiki Commons, after the session. So again, thank you for, for joining us and being here today. So real quick. Once do the agenda. So the welcome and housekeeping that's pretty much what we just did. We're going to review our brave friendly space agreement together. And then I'm going to pass it over to Mike O'Hearn our New York Regional Ambassador who's going to go over the program today talking about the basics of promoting an online event things to keep in mind when doing this during a global pandemic. Talking we've had a, we asked on the forum, you probably saw a place for questions, hoping, and things you hoped would get covered during today's session, and a couple of people have questions about engagement during your event so we are going to add that to the program today and we'll have space for questions and answers and discussion. Before we wrap up. So our brave friendly space agreement, we like to have this in all of the art and feminism events, whether they be virtual or in person. So this is the abbreviated version of that agreement. The goal of this session is to create an encouraging space for collective learning. This requires intentional behavior, wherein participants are conscious of and accountable for the effect of their statements and actions on others respect our experiences, and the experience of others and recognize that we can't do this work without one another. We agree to hold each other accountable to foster a brave friendly space. So I just wanted to pause there for a second and see if anybody has any questions about that, or anything they'd like to add to be fully present and engaged today.
Okay. So Meg O'Hearn is our facilitator today she is the New York State regional ambassador, Meg currently is the community and events coordinator for the iiif consortium previously she's held roles and content user relations and marketing at art store and ethica. She is also a photographer and cat lover, so I'm gonna pass it over to Meg now thanks so much.
Thanks Kira
Hi
everyone, it's great to be here. It's really funny to look at my Ambassador bio photograph, and see myself with bangs which was a luxury that I do not have now that we're in a pandemic and I cannot go to a hairdresser. So obviously a lot of things have changed since the pandemic started and so I'm really, I really tried to tailor this presentation. to. to take all of that into account and tailor online promotions, to like what people's experience now is being a human living through a terrible global pandemic. So I'm going to share my screen.
Okay, So you should be able to see my monitor. Can you, can everyone see it.
Okay, great.
I'm so sorry Meg I see the whole slide deck, not just the. I should put a slide here
is that getting cut off or anything or can you say the whole thing.
Oh good. Excellent. Okay.
So I was just going to start by kind of quickly going over some event promotion basics, and then talk a little bit about engagement during your event. And that wasn't something that we were originally going to cover but as Kara said it seemed like something that people had a lot of questions about and since it's actually kind of intertwined with the way that you promote an event, it made a lot of sense to include it. So I've incorporated the questions that you've asked in advance of today's session into the body of the presentation presentation. And I also have a couple questions that people asked that I thought might be helpful for the group to discuss so I added those on to the end. And they're a little bit covered in this presentation but I know that we probably have a lot of expertise here that we could benefit from. And bear with me as I change slides I just changed my monitor and laptop setup so I'm confused about where it's left and right and how I get my mouse onto which monitor, so bear with me as I struggled with that. So, successful online event, promotion really requires targeting and repetition and that's something that I want to start off by emphasizing. And there are some core questions that you should ask yourself, you know, you don't have to go into any sort of crazy amount of depth as you answer these questions, but they're really helpful to keep in mind as you write your different promotions on different platforms. So who is your audience. Who are the groups of people that you're targeting. There's probably segments of this so you know maybe you're just targeting a class that you're teaching, and it's pretty simple you know who they are. And you know a lot about, but maybe you work at an institution that has a lot of different audiences. Maybe they care about different things. Maybe they need different things from the editor athon, you know maybe some of them don't know how to edit Wikipedia and they need a lot of help learning that, and you're gonna have to you know make that clear that you can help them, maybe they don't need that much help. Where are they online. So where can you find them, is it via email, Twitter, and why are they online. So when are they actually accessing platforms. So, as we think about those go into a little bit more detail. So one of the most basic elements of this is really just making sure that the promotions you're writing, wherever you're writing them are interesting to the people that you're contacting. So you have a lot more opportunities for this when you're promoting things online and these very specific environments. So, like I was saying before your, you might have different audience members with different interests. So if you're holding an Edison in a museum. You might want to send one version of your promotion to the curators, and you might want to send a different version to the people who are signed up for your museums newsletter, and they probably have slightly different, you know some overlapping interests but also some different ones so maybe the curators are interested in updating the data for a particular artist that's like well represented in your collection, and maybe people on your newsletter list, are you know just interested in attending an event for your museum or learning to edit. With the help of a trusted institution. So keep that sort of thing in mind on what they care about. So hang on here going through my notes. So I think it's really important to include a clear call to action. When you are communicating this stuff. I should actually say that like when you're tailoring your message. You don't need to write an entire different entirely different promotion for each different venue that you're promoting and you might just have to tweak one or two sentences or, you know, add a sentence on that kind of catches that particular audience's attention. But above all, the most important thing in your promotion is a clear call to action for your particular audience. So think about, including. If you're trying to get them to register for an event. Have your registration link, like a pretty prominent place, and have relevant information to that particular audience that would make them want to click on your register button so give them like a you know if it's your students like you will get extra credit in this class for signing up for this edit athon register here, and then put the details under that just so like the call to action for that particular group like why they might want to attend is one of the first things that they see.
So, next. Consider the channels that are available to you and also tailor your message to those kind of just a, you know, communications basics. I think once you know who the people are and what they care about. It's a little bit easier to determine the proper venues where you can get in touch with them. So depending on your own situation and institution and the kinds of platforms that you have available to you. You may or may not have all the options that are listed on this, these slides. But you can really be creative, how you promote so if you don't have the ability to set up an event page on an organizational website. You can put it on your blog you can post on social media. You can email listservs. LinkedIn is a overlooked form of social media where you can get some interest, but also look towards partner organizations, and having them amplify your various promotions so if they could include your editor, on a newsletter, if they could share it on Twitter. If they have an email list that they would be willing to share the information on that sort of thing. And that can be like a mutually beneficial thing where you could also share their stuff. So it kind of works out. And then we also had a question about promoting events through Wikipedia, which I thought was a really interesting one. That's when asked us before the session. And we actually had to do a little bit of research about the best way to do this. And it was suggested that using the GAO notice she notices is handy and there's actually a link in the slide deck to the How to page for those for when those are available after the session, and also using the global calendar on Wikipedia for Women's History Month, where you can kind of put out a global call to attend your edits on which is a really handy other venue to get other people who are likely to be interested. Audience members. Okay. So just a few notes about timing and frequency which are really important when promoting virtual events and promoting things exclusively online. These are things that actually matter a lot. It doesn't seem like it would be super important but if you're tweeting it to am, when it's convenient to you if you're a night owl if you're having a long day, your audience might be sleeping and they might miss your message, or if you send an email at nine o'clock in the morning in your local time to a local group, people might just be starting their day, they might have a lot on their plates, and they might be more likely to just delete it without reading it than if you send it actually during lunch time which a lot of broad marketing research has shown that lunchtime is kind of the ideal thing, time to send messages so you might notice that you can't like sale emails. Early when they think you're lying in bed scrolling on your phone, or around lunch. When they know people are starting to back away from their work start taking time for themselves and go through the more interesting stuff that's in their inbox. So lunchtime is really great. And that's your local lunchtime you know if you're in Spain, that might be much later than it would be if you're here in New York. Also be sure to repeat your messaging. So, you know, if you're promoting an event through posters on a campus or at an institution somewhere, you're putting up your poster once, but people are walking by it continuously on social media or via email. It kind of disappears from the feed either getting deleted and put in the trash or, you know, other tweets have been tweeted and it's getting pushed down. So make sure to repeat your promotions, pretty frequently. If you're emailing. Don't feel bad about emailing twice, depending on how much you email your particular contacts you actually might want to send the invite three times. And if you're requiring registration for your event. You could exclude the contacts who have already signed up so you're not annoying them. Not that your promotions would be annoying but you know if they sign up already. It's confusing to get an invite again.
And my final recommendation is just make sure that you send reminders for your event. If you have their emails, because you've had them registering use that. And you know share the information the day before or the morning of, and also make sure that you send a final promotional note on social media, the day of because you never know who you're going to catch, who, you know, wasn't planning on attending event that day, but kind of fortuitously saw your posting, and was like you know what I have nothing to do and this sounds interesting. So I'm going to do it. I've seen a lot of attendees come from that kind of last minute, opting to attend. So the next thing is just really carefully considering defining the structure and the engagement methods that you're going to use for your event. So this kind of goes into people's questions about how to hold a virtual event and make it fun and engaging, but it also ties into your communications and your promotions, because you're really during COVID going to have to communicate all that stuff in advance. Don't save that for the last minute plan it all out and include the details in your communications and I'll go into how this stuff is best communicated. In the next section. Just to clarify. So just some ways to engage people online. I spend a lot of my professional career running online events from webinars to conferences and stuff like that. During it during a pandemic is really different. Just because of people's bandwidth like they're tired, their kids or their, you know their house is a mess, blah, blah, blah. We all have so much going on, that it's really kind of changed the requirements for for communicating this stuff and for thinking through the actual event. So it's something that I've struggled with a lot too over the past year trying to figure out, not being together in a room is really tough for a communal activity like an additive fun. And it's just really hard to recreate that sense of camaraderie that sense of activity to figure out how to go from this very personal space of editing an article as an individual to joining other people for talks or trainings, and then going back to the personal space and back to the collective space, and then being able to ask questions, when you're in either situation. And one way you know a lot of us have translated all of our work to zoom, you might not want to keep people on zoom for several hours and explore just some other options for having that personal space to work while still getting questions answered. And I actually recommend slack for that. So, if you haven't used slack before. A lot of us probably have but it's very user friendly pretty intuitive they also have some good demos and support documentation that you can go through to learn how to use it. There's also a totally free version available. So, you can set up a space that's specific to your edit athon. You don't have to be trying to invite people to your institutional slack instance if you have it, which is a whole other can of worms that I don't recommend doing, you can just set up a free version for your editors on and invite people to that. And you can treat that as kind of your central workspace, either for events that are happening during a specific time so you know if your event is on March 15 from 12 to 4pm, you can have your slack up for that and have everyone on there. Attending trainings and, you know, editing, blah, blah. Or you can actually keep it up you know if you are having an asynchronous event, and you want to leave that slack space up for a month. That's a great way to do it because people can go back through the questions that have been asked previously, you know you can have you and whoever's just assisting you with the event, logging on and answering questions. You know periodically through the day. It's just a really great way to handle things you can also actually in the free version of slack you have the ability to have one on one video calls so if someone really needs a lot of assistance you can just call them up through slack and talk to them immediately without having to go through the trouble of setting up the zoom call or anything like that.
So, if you are having an event that's part of part training or presentation or panel, and part individual work. You couldn't link the video that you're using or the zoom that you're using. In the Slack channel, so people can have a space to see announcements. They can have you could set up different channels for that channels for questions channels for certain topics channels for event announcements or you can just have one channel with a single stream that people are going through and catching up on. So, I wanted to show you see how to do this I wanted to show art and feminism just like, briefly, the slack instance that we used last year, although I'm actually having trouble bringing it up on my. Yeah. I'm having trouble bringing it up on my other monitor so Nevermind. But so I can just explain to you what we did, without you going and looking through everyone's comments. Basically, we had a single Slack channel that we used for the Edit athon last March, which was very quickly moved into an online format because that was one of the pandemic was really starting to ramp up in New York and we realized things were starting to get kind of dangerous. So, the transition was actually pretty easy, and we were able to just set up a single channel for the online address on engage people by posting to say hello. When they came in the room and all the people who are arranging the event kind of lead by example and everyone who signed into the editor sign and join a slack kind of just followed that example, and introduced themselves. We had people post what they were editing and people who comment on a thread underneath that, and just talk about it, you know, either say things as simple as I love that artist or. Oh, I noticed this link was wrong or, you know, something like that. And so people had the experience of kind of interacting with other people on their edits in these brief ways that they might have during an in person on one of the really nice things that happened in the Slack channel was, we had one of the people leading the event periodically posting stats about how many articles had been edited. And that was a great way to kind of keep people motivated throughout the day. And it was really amazing to see you know when there had been like, you know, 1500 edits, you know, at the point in the middle of the day, like that's that's the thing that's like, oh wow there really are a lot of people here doing this, and although I can't see them. And I'm working alone. You know, like a lot of stuff is getting done. And it's also a place where people could ask questions so there were some Wikipedia ones who are on the Slack channel and were able to help with like more difficult issues. So if people had articles that had some serious problems they could help out with that and other people could answer more simple questions. So slack is a great resource. And I encourage you to consider that as a way to kind of manage that moving between individual work that's supported and collective presentations, another platform that I just recently became aware of is called Remo. So, this is something that I was researching for my own professional work. But then, the more I looked at it I realized it might have a lot of potential for live editor songs where you're working in, you know like, over the course of a day or like a four or five hour period. You do have to pay for it. There's a monthly fee structure that's actually pretty affordable, but it's small enough that it could be covered by grant funding, depending on your event size and how many institutions you're partnering with so if you're having a small event and you're a single institution. It could be it could be very easily covered by a grant I think it's about 50 attendees. And the next step up you would likely have to partner with someone to cover it with grants. With grant funding. But it's really interesting because it works kind of like zoom in that you have people register and sign on and you can have video presentations, either live or pre recorded with q&a, and people can take the microphone and ask questions so it's kind of, you know, just like zoom in that respect, but then the thing that really attracted me to it is that it has this feature called discussion tables.
I think my next slide is just a screenshot of those. Yeah. So, this is what the discussion tables look like. It's like being in the room, that you would hold your event in, and you can name, each table you see one of these tables has been changed to the best table. You can make them topic based tables. And when people join these tables by clicking on them they're actually thrown into a video call with the other participants who are sitting at that table. So if you want to set up a discussion topic, either like around questions about editing. Questions about copyright, you could set up all these different topics and attendees can also set their own table topics so if they find you know that there are several people who are interested in. I don't know on a Monday. They could set an on a Monday no discussion table, and you know go meet with each other. Work through the article they're working on. You know even share their contact information if they wanted to stay in touch after the event. So I thought that was particularly handy. And you know you, if you had a table for hosts or Wikipedia ins to hang out at and answer the tough questions you could set that up. So, just a thought that it seemed particularly well suited to this kind of event. And in these discussion table setups I think you can have about 500 attendees so it's pretty robust.
So,
some other ways to create that sense of togetherness. Aside from, you know, seeing yourself as an avatar on a screen in a conference room is just having other shared experiences. So those tables obviously a great way to do it. They're platform specific if there are other ways you'd like to do it. I would. I think the first thing I would say is to keep in mind that online events give a lot of freedom to your attendees, in a way. So, if you're divided into breakout groups at an in person event, you're kind of stuck there you can just leave. But if you're online, you can just kind of close out of that zoom window and never look back. And people do do that so I've seen a lot of breakout rooms, leading to a number of people leaving events. You know a number of people do stay but you know maybe half of your attendees will be like, Oh, I'm not ready to engage at this level. So I think I guess the point that I'm trying to make is don't force engagement. Make the engagement optional because people are tired. And, you know, they might be at home, eating ice cream in their pajamas while they're attending your event, and they don't want to get on a video call with five other people that they were suddenly thrown into you know there's a lot going on in people's lives. So don't force people into this kind of thing. Make it optional, and definitely don't make it a surprise that it's going to happen. So, there are some other ways that you can set things up to have that sense of togetherness, and that are kind of more optional to participate in. And like have a lower barrier to entry than like having to have a conversation with people. So I really recommend just recognizing that this is where people are right now, and being clear that there are options for people to engage at different levels. In doing that in your communications. So there's some easy things that you can do so if you create a playlist that you share with attendees, or if you have your attendees build a shared playlist together, that you're listening to. That's a nice thing to do. That's collaborative and, you know, kind of a low effort. You can pose icebreaker questions in your Slack channel if you're using that or if you're having a zoom call. You can ask answer, ask sorry ask questions in the q&a. So easy stuff like, show us your pet or, like, what article Are you editing or, you know, who is your favorite artist or just easy stuff that people can like connect on and have other conversations with a 10 years without having to like have, you know, feel forced into it. Another thing that I've seen be very successful actually is if you're going to end your event with some sort of like happy hour cocktail hour or something like that. Coming up with a recipe that everyone can make together, and communicating that in advance and, you know, having the same like gin cocktail or something like that, or, you know, deciding that you're all going to have tea together in the afternoon or that sort of thing. Finally, creating a sense of the global participation that goes into art and feminism, it's nice to have the hash tag for edit a THON, which is the now editing AF hash tag that's up on the slide. You could also do things like show. Pull up, Twitter, on your screen and show how many people are posting under that hashtag just to give people a sense of like the scale of of the art and feminism editor fonts. So, that brings me to the next topic, which is just crafting your messaging and how you're going to discuss your well you know describe your event in your promotions. And once you've considered all the specifics of how you're going to run these events and engage people I think then that's when you're really ready to to send out the specifics.
So I think above all when you're promoting virtual events during the pandemic there's two things to keep in mind. And that's just how tired people are. And that virtual events, reach a lot more people than you might expect them to. So, all the work that you did figure out how your event is going to work, make sure that you communicate it to the attendees in advance. I would err on the side of over communicating, rather than under communicating. It's better for people to know exactly what's going to happen then to have questions, so I would consider sending an agenda with timestamps, you know, the event starts at 3pm at 3:05pm, we're going to have a training at 4pm, we're going to have a question and answer section, you know, at 4:20pm, we're going to have time to work alone. We're going to come back together at 5pm for this panel discussion and really stick to those timestamps and that might mean you have to, like, you know, be a little bit after your presenters to stay on top of things. And if you know stuff happens like if you're running a few minutes behind. Like, share that if you're using a Slack channel or share it in your zoom q&a or, you know, somewhere where people can kind of get a sense of where they are in the event. And that really lets people just drop into the parts that they're interested in, which is something that we've seen a lot of is like someone might not have the bandwidth to attend for our edit a THON, but they can still attend the hour long training, and at least get that under their belt. I would also say that if you're using any specialized platforms like zoom, or Remo or any of the other online event platforms just be really clear about how they're going to be used in advance. And what attendees need to know to participate and make sure you provide in advance of the session some contact information for questions. So people might be confused about a zoom URL they might be confused about signing up for a repo. They might not know like how to access the first presentation at your event. You know and maybe it's just that they didn't read your promotions closely enough but again, people are really tired. So create that space for them to get in touch with you and quickly get the information that they need. So, yeah, so, the idea of scope of online events. This is kind of a funny one. So, because your event is online and you're promoting it online, you might think you're just promoting it to local audience like people who come to your library or people who come to your museum. Students at your university but it actually could reach a lot more people locally and just people who follow your institution or your library or anything like that on social media or through other channels and find out about the event are interested and want to join. So, this means two things I think being prepared to assist more people during your event, than you might expect to come to your in person event. It's a lot easier to click on a button and join something online than it is to get out of your house, drive somewhere and walk in the door, but also keeping in mind that your talks and presentations are going to reach a wider audience. And that might be an international audience that might be an out of state audience, and I have a kind of funny story around this let's see it seems kind of like self, you know like, like, Oh, well what issue would be there you know with with having like not tailoring our content. So I was recently partaking in a workshop actually on holding virtual events because I you know I like to keep up to date on my professional development, and it was through an institution in California, and it was something that would have happened locally in LA. Except you know it was open to everyone because it's an online event. And so I am the New Yorker who signed up, and I was attending this event with a bunch of people in LA, and a large part of the event was the event content was based on this recurring joke of New Yorkers being too cynical for this. The content they're presenting. And I was kind of like, you know, haha. And after eight hours It was like okay, like, I'm the New Yorker, you know.
And while it wasn't offensive, it was like, just one of those silly things where it's not thinking about, like, what it means to hold an event that is now reaching beyond your initial audience. So keep in mind so you know you have you avoid those entirely avoidable situations. I also I'm not going to go into this much here because I, I think it would just be a whole other hour or more, but I also feel like I should point this out that, like, just as much as events being virtual opens them up to wider attendance in terms of numbers. It can also exclude people, you know. Similarly, so if people don't have strong internet skills, they might not be able to attend, or might have trouble attending and need a lot of assistance or people who only have access to a smartphone and not a laptop, you know maybe struggling or unable to attend your event. Something just fell upstairs, or people who don't have reliable internet access at home who might have otherwise been able to attend your event might not be able to people with certain disabilities might struggle with their platform. So just try to keep those things in mind as you plan. And as we talked about this idea of virtual events, being more accessible in some ways I just felt like that should be something that was clarified. So that's about all I have for the presentation. I have some links that I'm going to share after the q&a to a few more resources that kind of dive more into the specifics of promoting events like until the real nitty gritty things like email subject lines and, you know, words to use and words not to use, but I kind of wanted to cut some of that out just to have the discussion about event engagement. And so we could talk about some of the questions that people on the call now have and that people submitted before, so I'll share that slide afterwards and you guys can get access to that but I thought to start that there are some questions that were submitted from the group which I tried to incorporate into the presentation but they might benefit from a little bit of group discussion if people are interested in talking about them. No pressure. If you don't want to. I'm happy to just sit here and answer them as best I can and maybe Kara has some ideas too. So, but if you feel like discussing these feel free. So one of the things that we had received a question about was recommendations about accessible digital promoting. And one of the things, this person had discussed was creating a Google Doc, to promote the event and using that instead of a PDF flyer type thing. So PDFs are, you know, challenging for screen readers to read and a Google document is pretty easy and it also has the URLs to various aspects of the event that are easily clickable. So I thought that was a really great idea and honestly if I was promoting my own event and needed to do this that would probably be my own approach, but I'm curious if people on the phone, have anything or on the video. Have something that, that they would also like to recommend that can be helpful to. And you can feel free to unmute yourself or just type into the chat, which I'm just looking at now.
Something else I can offer in regards to accessibility of digital promotions is using that alt text option. So, alt text is read by screen readers. And so just really making sure that in your promotion, and on social media, that you use that all text. Part option and not. I know not all websites, but many websites, also, like on the back end so like talking about your own website and it depends on like what kind of institution you're at, who might have access to that but also using the alt text function for not only any kind of digital promotions, but also all images that you're using is really important in terms of accessibility. Yeah, that's great to set.
Any other thoughts or Has anyone had any experience with this. Okay, so next question that we had was any tips for asynchronous events. So my thought on that was what worked really well with a Slack channel, but I'm not sure if people have any other experiences that that would be handy to discuss. And I'll give it a second if people want to type for it, or talk. Either way,
something that I've seen some other event organizers do if they have like kind of a long period for their editors on because at first, it's virtual is to punctuate it with some events. So, maybe near the beginning of a week long editor thought they have training, and then maybe like midweek, there's a panel, and then maybe another time there's dedicated like there's going to be wikimedians around to help answer your questions. So, having just some punctuated programming. A long and asynchronous event. I seen some other organizers, do that.
Yeah, that seems like it would be really great for keeping up the momentum for sure. So when another thing that we had was tips for teaching new editors over zoom.
I mean,
I think
one thing that I really think about like zoom is great for a single demo.
But
terms of those questions that kind of keep coming up as you're editing like if you were in a THON in person and you got through one section you do it and then you hit another roadblock and you need to go find someone to help you. I think that's where things like slack can be really handy. It can be also recreated through zoom, I think, by having clearly identified helpers. Maybe people will change their name over zoom to be like, you know, if I was one of the people for asking questions during the event, and, you know, if I had Mick O'Hearn she her. And you know, had changed my name to say like assistant, or you know, ask me questions. People can send you a direct message through the chats, rather than chatting to the group. And you can have like a more limited conversation. Through the direct messages that won't get lost in as easily in everyone else's questions, just because it's between you and that person I kind of specifies that. So that could be a really handy way I've done that some of during some of the events for triple AF where I work to.
And just to that note, just in case you weren't aware, you are able to add emojis to your name in, in, in zoom so that can be helpful to you So here I'll just do it as like an example. So you could be like anybody who's, you know, who has the little artists palette can help with whatever questions. And so that's also a good visual identifier for, and you could do different emojis for different roles like this person's if you have like a zoom question. This person's You know, there are librarians that can help with references, these people are like, wikimedians, you could even have an emoji are an identifier of people who are like brand new to all of this and just kind of like, you know, a newbie kind of indicator as well.
I will say I didn't think of this previously but Carrie you saying that kind of, I don't know, kind of jog my memory. If you have an edit athon that you're holding exclusively over zoom and it's kind of, you know, maybe a couple hours long. It's nice to have kind of like a boilerplate slide that you show every once in a while, with kind of the critical information for your event like people to ask for help. The agenda. Were to sign into your dashboard that sort of thing. So that as people are joining and leaving. They're getting that information it's not just shared once at the beginning and then people who sign in late, have no idea what's going on.
Yeah, that's a great point because as you all may or may not know that with the zoom chat, you don't see the chat from before you joined. So anything that was shared at the beginning and you weren't there yet you're not going to see it so it is really a good practice in general to just pay, even if you're not doing a lot of that to this like periodically share those, those main links or bits of information.
Yeah, very helpful. Okay, so it looks like there are just here, it looks like you answered a few questions in the chat. Throughout the presentation. I am just going to read them so that they're on the recording just because that's kind of handy to have. And one is how would you publicize a new Slack channel. Can you put the address on a public site, or is that a security risk. So and Kerry's response was a really great one it was to share the Slack channel to the attendees either live at the event or when they register. And that she would not recommend publishing it on a public site. There are also ways that you can set up a slack to be invite only and I, where you have to approve new members and I'm actually not sure how you can do that. I do know that from my own personal work we have that some sort of situation set up where we approve the new people that join just, you know, so who we know who they are. And that link we do post on a public site. I'm sure something about that is in the slack documentation but I unfortunately I'm not able to speak to it. Another question is do you recommend using registration in order to cap events. So yeah, if you only want to handle 50 attendees. I would definitely require registration, so that people know in advance that they will not be able to attend. If you're using things like Eventbrite for that. You have the ability to cap the number of registrations that you allowed and a number of other presentation platforms like remote one stuff like that will also allow you to limit the number of attendees that you have
to that though I would also say that I mean, I feel like as the pandemic goes on these numbers continue to shift, but you should always account for a certain amount of attrition. So, if you want, 50 people to attend your event. And you actually want 50 people to attend your event, you should consider making your event registration for 20 to 30% more than that, just so you kind of hit that number. But honestly, it's, it's really fluctuated in terms that attrition. Throughout the pandemic and I think is going to continue to fluctuate, but it'll it's always there, like even in the best of times there's always a little bit of a trash picture and for whatever reason to event attendance.
Yeah, absolutely. Like you might find yourself with hundreds of registrants when you were only expecting you know 150, just because of the reach but you know maybe 200 of those will attend or, you know, it really depends. But that's a really good point. There's a suggestion on here which I really like in the chat, which is taking a group photo to document the event. And I would also add that if you're taking a group photo like a screenshot of everyone in their little Brady Bunch even windows. You can also share that on social media to kind of promote the event, as it's happening, if you have the capacity for that it's always fun.
And it's always a good practice though to let everyone know you're doing it, because then that way, if somebody doesn't want to be in it, they can turn their camera off so it's just always important to, you know, ask for consent and if they don't wish to, they can turn their camera off and have that option. Yep.
Hello. Hello.
Hello.
I just wanted to find out if I'm hosting a virtual event. And, you know, some of them may up to 10 of the camera. If I take a screenshot of that, and I upload it on comments, is that not like, I don't know, since it's coming from zoom, or a platform. Would that not be copyright violation or something, taking a screenshot of like virtual participants and uploading it to Media Commons.
Gerald Do you want to take this question actually.
Hi, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. No, how would it be copyrighted because you're, you're literally taking a picture of people you're not taking a picture of the zoom icon or the zoom logo. So I'm, I'm not under exactly understanding why would even be copyrighted. It'll be a consent issue with the people being taken photographs of but you're not taking the logo of zoom.
Yeah, I think I got a feedback from one of the rapid grantees, when I submitted a report. I completed a project and I took a group of a trial. Some of our sessions I took a screenshot and I posted it, and I was asked to pull that down. I should avoid using screenshots from zoom, because the zoom logo was showing on the screen. It's not. I did not understand but, you know, that was the feedback I had so I had to take that off.
Yeah, it's the logo issue, but I don't think it's the actual people who you took picture of it sounds like.
Yeah, so maybe Sadik, because it's happening in the people are saying this in the chat too like getting everyone's consent is definitely important, but maybe if you're taking a screenshot you just crop out the zoom logo or make sure that or whatever proprietary platform that you might be using. Whether it be zoom or stream yard or Google meat or anything like that just kind of first making sure everybody, you have everyone's consent and then cropping out any kind of proprietary logo. You can have the Art+Feminism logo though.
So, one way that I have handled the privacy issue which is a legitimate one is informing people in advance that we might take a screenshot and doing what Jay just recommended in the chat, which is asking everyone to change their names to, if they don't want their name showing up on the screen, not just their image just ask them to change it to like an emoji or like, you know, a dog or something. So they are truly anonymous with their camera off before you take the screenshot.
That's a great suggestion Jay. Yeah. Are there other questions that y'all have.
Alright, Meg Do you want to share your links. Yeah, so these are the chat.
That's really handy. Thank you. Um, these are you know this isn't like any crazy amount of documentation, but we do have a guide to event promotion that I put together last year that has a lot more like nitty gritty stuff about communications and timing and channels and stuff like that, that might be helpful it does still have some recommendations for in person events like posters and stuff like that. But a lot of the information is helpful there and still holds true so I shared that because it might be helpful to have like a little bit more detailed information event bright also has like a pretty good virtual event marketing guide that has a lot of the stuff that we covered today and a little bit more. But I thought that that would be handy because I thought it was a particularly nice one. It came through my inbox. A few days ago. So I thought, folks might benefit from, from what was written by them. And Kira just posted those in the chat and they'll be available in the slides.
And then lastly, I just wanted to really highlight that we do have some virtual event meeting resources on our website and I just put that in the chat as well. The virtual meeting guide actually does have a sample outline of how you might consider organizing a virtual event. It also has some suggested settings for for safety in terms of using zoom in particular. And then we also have done a couple of screen captures of doing walkthroughs through a couple different platforms that you might consider hosting your virtual event on and recognizing of course that there are a bazillion resources about how to use zoom but ours is kind of thinking about the art and feminism organizers. In particular, and then I want to highlight something that Meg mentioned as well is that if you are thinking about using one of these platforms, we do have micro funding available through art and feminism. And so those are up to $250. And they could cover the expense of if you need to use zoom or if you need to. Or if you want to explore. What is this new one called Roco. If you want to explore Remo, sorry. If you want to explore using rainbow art as a micro grant could help fund that. So thank you all again so much for, for joining us. We will be posting the slide deck the transcript and the recording on our website. So if you wanted to revisit any of these resources we will have them available on our website. Shortly, but thank you again for joining us and thank you so much Meg for presenting and facilitating this.
Yeah, Thanks everyone for having me and for your really excellent questions and also for helping out with discussing questions at the end. That was really great.
