Virtual Family Programs

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!

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!