After the first You Are The Union livestream, Amir and I knew we had room to improve. It went really well, but not everything that we were hoping for happened. Mainly, we had technical issues with trying to get the livestream up on YouTube at the same time. And then after we were not able to save it so we could have a replay. We want these livestreams to be available at any time, so we knew we had to work on fixing it.
Once we had our next one scheduled, we took extra time to make sure we were clear on the process of how to make the livestream work. We did multiple test runs and made a checklist of every step that we have to take each time to make sure that it works. It’s not the easiest process, but it’s worth it to make it happen so we are willing to do the work. Plus, I have a feeling that as we do these more often, they will get easier and easier for us to set up.
We also wanted to make sure that things just ran smoothly and easily once the livestream was started. This mainly was stuff I needed to be able to do. Since Amir is hosting live, I want to run all the behind the scenes stuff so he doesn’t have to think about it. We tried a system of me texting him the questions from the guests the first time, and that didn’t exactly work. This time, we decided on a Google Doc where I could change the list of questions if we were getting a lot about the same topic or if something needed to be next instead of another question. So on my end, I needed to have a lot of windows open to keep it all together. I had the Google Doc with our questions, the Zoom window with the Zoom chat and participant lists popped out, the YouTube page to make sure the video was still streaming there, and the YouTube chat popped out. This is what my screen ended up looking like while we ran the second livestream.
It was a bit crazy, but it really worked for me in the end. I did switch between windows a lot, but it was easy enough to monitor everything at once. I monitored the chats on Zoom and YouTube to pull questions, looked at the participant list to see our Waiting Room, and tracked any raised hands in Zoom if someone wanted to ask a question on video. The first livestream, we didn’t have many people interested in asking questions on video so we debated removing that option. But this time, more people wanted to do that so I’m glad we allowed for both video and text questions.
Our second livestream was about diversity, inclusion, and Black Lives Matter. We had Tiffany Yvonne Cox and Michelle Hurd as our guests and it was so incredible. I was thrilled that the livestream went so much better than the first one did, but I was even more thrilled about the conversation that happened during it. This was exactly what we hoped would happen and I’m so glad that our audience seemed to feel the same way.
And because we were able to run everything smoothly this time, we also were able to create a replay of the livestream. The replay is pretty much the entire livestream, we just edited 1 minute at the beginning and 1 minute in the end when we were still getting things set up. But all of the discussion, questions, and conversation was kept in. We didn’t want to censor or edit our guests in any way, and I’m glad we were able to keep the full thing up for anyone to watch at any time.
I’m so proud of this livestream. I was crying at times while it happened because this is exactly what Amir and I dreamed of creating. And we never thought we would have exactly what we wanted by the second livestream. We thought we might have some more things to work through. But I think all of our practice runs and preparation paid off and helped us make all the improvements we were looking to make.
We are working on planning our next one. We have had a bit of a delay due to some timing issues, but we are hopeful we will have another one happening in a week. And we have a few topics in our lineup that we are considering, so we should be creating a nice schedule over the next few months. And we do want to do another one on diversity because we know this is not a one and done topic. This is an evolving discussion and we want to create a space for people to discuss it and get answers. That is so important and being able to provide it makes me so happy.
I’m still so excited that I have helped to create this livestream and how quickly it has been embraced by so many people. So many of the viewers were people who are not currently involved in union service and it was a great way to get to meet new people and to hear what they are hoping to see from the union. And we have a few people who have expressed interest in union service and asking what steps they can do. That is amazing and not something I expected. But like I’ve always said, all I want to do is to educate other union members and to make sure they understand what is going on. And maybe that does mean getting more people involved in union service so they are an active participant and able to help educate others in their social circles.
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Another Amazing You Are The Union Livestream (or Learning So Much About Being A Better Ally)
