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Virtual Family Programs

Angela Leftwich
$organization

Hi friends! We are interested in how other organizations are handling family programs.

 

Do you have patrons register through Tessitura?

What distribution channels are you using? Virtual meeting or live streaming? What platforms are used for live streaming?

How do you get the link to the patron?

How often are the programs offered?

What is attendance like? Do you have attrition?

Do you have paid advertising support and/or grant funding support?

Are you charging for any virtual programs (re: static cost or PWYC)?

What operational limitations do you face (i.e. distribution, clearances, staff, etc.)?

Do you focus on asynchronous vs. synchronous programming?

How are you handling minor data?

 

If using a virtual meeting:

What platform are you using (i.e. Zoom, Teams, etc.)?

How are you allowing each registrant into the virtual meeting if Zoom or Teams?

If minors participate, do you record the session?

  • $organization

    Hi Angela, 

    I'm at The Tech Interactive, a family-focused science and technology center in San Jose, CA. Here's what we've done for two recent kid/family programs for members. 

    • Registration through TNEW so that the data is in Tessitura and so that only members can register.
    • The event is done as a Zoom meeting so that participants can interact with the facilitator.
    • The day of or day before the event, I look up the list of registrants in Tessitura and email them the Zoom connection info.
    • We have done monthly programs for members. Not all of them are kid-focused.
    • We have sometimes had as low as 50% of registrants attend the event live when it was a lecture-style webinar that would be recorded and made available for replay. For the two recent interactive events for families, attendance was 75% or greater of registrants. (For the first of those two, we explicitly warned that no recording would be made available after.)
    • No member event funding support outside of our regular membership budget.
    • We have not been charging for member events; we are considering a model of members for free and general public for a price. The focus would be less on generating revenue and more on showing members the "value" of their free tickets.
    • Operationally, we have reduced membership department staffing to plan, promote, and runt events. Most of our events are led or facilitated by The Tech staff, which has the benefit of keeping things in house and also the limitation of working around those staff's regular workloads.
    • We have focused on getting members to attend our events live. As stated above, some events have a replay video available afterward that we link to in the member newsletter, with modest viewership.
    • We do not collect minors' data in the registration process; the (adult) member registers on TNEW and we only ask how many in the household will be participating (so that we can get a headcount, not just a household count).
    • As stated earlier, we use Zoom; we set the meeting to have all attendees enter a waiting room, then when we are ready to start the program, we let them into the meeting. We do not check attendee names against the registration list, but we have a moderator/support person on every event who can mute/disable video/remove attendees if someone is not behaving appropriately.
    • For the two recent events that were interactive with kids, we did not record the sessions for public replay because we did not want to show minors in video without their families' permission.

    Let me know if you're curious about anything else we do!

  • $organization

    Hi Angela,

    Hope your family programs are going well! Here's some info on what we're doing. I'd be curious to hear what you decided on attendance as well, particularly streamed events that don't require a registration.

    We're requiring registration for many programs through Tessitura or TNEW. We're primarily using Zoom but are dabbling in YouTube and Facebook Premier. For programs with a registration, we're including text in the confirmation email using LTR_TNEW_DYN_EMAIL_CONTENT followed by a reminder email the day of the event. We have a pretty good track record of people showing up, especially if they registered in advance. Some programs come with goody boxes or activity kits that folks can safely pick up in our parking lot, and those seem to be popular. Using our gallery attendance as a metric, I'd say 80% of registered people attend. Most programs are free but depending on the goody box, we might charge for those. We still charge for virtual art classes, camps, or workshops.

    For programs using Zoom, we're only sharing the links with folks who've registered which has kept things pretty well under control. As far as recordings go, we tell folks that the session is being recorded and may be shared with others. If they do not wish to be recorded, they're welcome to turn off their camera and either omit their name or participate under an alias.

    We've had just a few streamed programs that have not required registration. We're unsure of where the cutoff is for attendance though and I would be curious on your thoughts. Do you just count views within the first 24 hours? The first week? 

    I hope that's helpful!