Individuals livestream to fight racial injustice

Published

We have seen livestreaming video take off as people around the world follow stay-at-home ordinances. It has been used to replicate virtual family dinners, facilitate team building, workout from the comforts of your garage, provide tutorials to cut your own hair and more. We are also seeing the benefits of livestreaming to support grassroots efforts in fighting the injustice of racial inequality. Continue reading to see how JustGiving’s new ability to embed a live video can be utilized by your community.

What is Livestreaming?

This is just the act of transmitting or receiving live video and audio coverage of (an event) over the Internet. Organizations may be shifting to this approach as they re-create galas or benefits exclusively online, deliver messages to students while they learn from home, or encourage their constituents to host real-time video feeds in response to local or global events.

To livestream a video, people use websites or platforms, such as YouTube, Twitch or Mixer to broadcast what they are doing in real-time.

Live or Pre-Recorded? What is best?

Michael Hoffman speaks of the power of a simulated live video (aka, a previously recorded video) in A Hack to Dramatically Improve Your Virtual Events. The biggest takeaway for me was that if the quality of your message will be significantly impacted due to technical difficulties, then it is best to pre-record. For example, if you are trying to bring a few people online and in video for a message while having a limited amount of time live, you may want to pre-record it. If the content is more informal in nature, a hot topic that needs to be addressed now, or contains a smaller group of broadcasters, it may translate really well into live video.

The benefit of Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising™, powered by JustGiving™ is that organizations can embed previously-recorded, professional YouTube videos into the Story of a campaign while individuals can feed live video at the top of their personal page (that will also be saved for future viewing) through YouTube, Mixr or Twitch.

Whether they want to broadcast a head shave, trivia competition or their response to racial injustice, it’s simple for them to share a live video of their fundraising activity – all on their Fundraising Page on JustGiving. Kate livestreamed live conversations on May 31 to raise $13k for The Bail Project while John played video games for 24-hours to support the Black Lives Matter Foundation.

And what’s more – you can use it too! Simply set-up a Fundraising Page under your Organization’s Name and add a video livestream to connect with your supporters. For example, our friends at the charity Chester Zoo recently went live on JustGiving to give people a behind the scenes look at the zoo during the COVID-19 lockdown.

How can we do livestreaming on JustGiving?

In just a few simple steps, your supporters can add a YouTube, Twitch or Mixer livestream to their Fundraising Page on JustGiving, so their family and friends can watch their fundraising activity and make a donation all in one place.
Share our livestreaming step-by-step guide with your supporters to help them get started. You can promote livestream fundraising in four simple steps:

Add a page to your website explaining how your supporters can do livestream fundraising. Here’s a great example from the charity St. John’s Ambulance
Update your community fundraising packs with information about livestream fundraising, and make it available to download from your website
Refresh your email communications with examples of livestream fundraising and share our free livestream resources to help your supporters on their way
Inspire your supporters on social media with examples and ideas

Now, more than ever, you have the opportunity to increase your mission’s support while fostering more community engagement. We believe the recent launch of Livestream Fundraising can better power the difference makers and our social good heroes. Drop us a comment below and let us know how you plan to leverage livestreaming!

News JustGiving® from Blackbaud® Blog 06/09/2020 9:30am EDT

Added by Stephanie Thomas

1 Comments

Alison Carpenter Jun '20

Thank you for sharing Stephanie. I think this is a really interesting piece. I agree that you have to take into account quality of message, but also engagement. If you feel like folks shouldn't engage at the beginning and only listen, have a prerecorded video and then have a Q and A live. Additionally, I wanted to point out the awesome nature of prerecorded videos with increased engagement through the chat feature (having a prerecorded video, but engage folks with chats or comments).

The incredible pairing of video with JustGiving opens the door for so much creativity. I cannot wait to keep seeing amazing examples.