"The donor experience livestream that didn’t go as planned...”

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Nonprofit Diaries. Here we share the stories that don't make the newsletter. I'm your host, Kimberly Bottom, and anyone who has tried to create a memorable donor moment knows that a bigger production can sometime create bigger surprises, right? So today's guests lived through that experience during an ambitious live broadcast attempt in Thailand, where a satellite, an Ethernet cable, and a room full of celebrating children tested even a seasoned production team. David is now a senior digital strategist at BuildGood, where he uses his fundraising experience to help nonprofits improve their donor journeys and digital campaigns. David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Oh, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Excited to chat through this. We were commiserating together because for those of you that don't know, I am a recovering broadcast journalist. I used to work in live news. So when David was sharing his story with me, I was like, I feel this in my bones. This is these are the things I still have like those night sweats about. You wake up and you're like, oh, wait, I'm not there. Okay, it's fine. So it really was overall with the best of intentions, but you went all the way to Thailand to create an impactful donor experience. What was the initial plan? Tell us that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Yeah, so there was this really beautiful idea that we were going to uh visit one of the projects in Thailand and have a birthday celebration for 100, 150 kids uh who maybe hadn't didn't have the means to have their own big celebration. So we uh we were going to gather them all together, have some organized games and some music and dancing, and then donors back in Canada would be able to gather at the head office, um, have their own sort of little party with some balloons and some coffee and and little light snacks. Uh, and then at the right moment the feed from Thailand would be brought in onto the big screens, and and they would have this moment to kind of see their kids celebrating, their own sponsored children celebrating, um, and hear a little bit from from the uh the manager of the ADP there.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Oh my gosh. What a first of all, great idea, right? Like what an impactful moment for donors to feel like they're they're there in a place where they typically can't be. So such a great idea. But there are a couple plot twists to this story. Plot twist, number one, the technology actually became almost an illegitimate health risk. What happened there?

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Yeah. So we we had this um uh very early sort of Starlink uh satellite uh transceiver. And you would, uh based on where you were in the world, kind of angle it just the right way, point it up to the sky just the right way at the right angle. Um, and it would it would give you, I think it was about a half, uh, half a megabit connection. It was like 500k. So not not not uh super fast, but but fast enough to send some video uh back to Canada. And so we decided we would do some testing before we headed down there, and we set it up outside of the office uh in in Mississauga, just outside of Toronto, and uh sent some video through it and just to confirm that inside the office they could see this feed from outside the office. And all over this satellite transceiver, it said stay two meters back. It said, Don't don't put your head near this thing. I actually read I reread the manual today because I was I was thinking about all the all the warnings that were on it. And it was actually said, like, don't put your head near it. Uh if you have a pacemaker or or um uh hearing aids, like you stay, you stay even further away. There were signs that like you you shouldn't you should listen to the warnings and and don't don't go right in front of this thing. Um so we ran our tests and uh we we kind of we've we decided, yeah, everything's working well, we can we can pack up. And and my colleague uh immediately just picks it up and puts it under his arm. And all I could think of was like the the daffy duck like in front of the X-ray where you can see the bones through it, like this this beam of of data going through his body. Um and I was convinced like he's either he's either gonna get sick from this or if he has something that's cured now, like that that radiation just going through him, it's it's then one or the other.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

You had mentioned this is early 2000s, right, when this was happening?

SPEAKER_01 4:32

So it was 2011. So very start of 2011. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and so we didn't have we didn't um we had do, I mean, we had high speed at that point, like if for you know, all over, but we didn't know what they would have in in this project in Thailand. And so that's why we wanted this satellite to be this really fancy thing.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah, I remember I was in news at the same time that you were doing this, and I remember those satellite boxes, and it was like the most forward technology. But yeah, there was there was a lot of caveats to that. And it's funny, you said you you got to Thailand and realized you didn't really even need it, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, so we we we're start starting to set up all of our equipment uh on on this balcony. It's uh it's over a courtyard. School's kind of U-shaped with a courtyard and a stage. And I'm setting everything up and and the uh local staff members like, what's what's this for? We said, well, we didn't know what kind of internet. He's like, well, when you could we've got really high-speed internet, you could just we have an Ethernet cable, we could just plug in. So we ended up actually running off of the wired connection from the school with just using the satellite as as a backup because their their wired connection uh was faster than than we had anticipated.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Well, I mean, it's nice that it worked out and you could just use it, but your poor friend just risked his life for nothing.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Oh my gosh. So, okay, plot twist number one. Good stories got to plot twist. Plot twist number two. With all of your well-laid plans, there was a bit of an issue hearing while this actual live stream was going on, and it sort of affected how the donors experienced it. What happened there?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah, so so we when we got there, uh the party was sort of getting going. It was a Saturday morning in Thailand, Friday evening back in Toronto. Um, and we realized pretty quickly that my camera operator on the ground with his wireless headset could not hear me up in the balcony with my wireless headset because of all the noise around him. And we also had a stage manager whose job it was to go and get um uh the the the the project manager at the right time to come and do her interviews so that in Toronto they could hear. And she also couldn't hear us through her headset. Um and then we realized that the the producer back in Canada he couldn't hear us because of all the noise. So we we had this this team that was a really good team, kind of ready to work together um to to bring this uh show to life at the right at the right moment, but nobody could actually hear each other. And so we're using hand signals to try to direct the camera from a balcony while he's shooting. Of course, you can't look at what he's shooting and look up at me at me waving. Um so it was it was quite a quite a bit of a chaotic uh moment. And it it was sort of contrasted with this uh scene in Toronto of older donors sitting at round tables with their coffee and their cookies in polite conversation. In the Toronto office, there was this control room with the audio guys and the video guys all sat, and it had single pane glass that kind of separated it from the main room and and the the windows opened. And usually they were open so that the audio guy could hear what was going on. Um and my my colleague and friend at the other end, uh, he's starting to get frustrated because he he can't he can't hear. He's like, What? What was that? What was that? And then all of a sudden he's he's yelling, I can't hear because of all the screaming kids. And at that point, somebody kind of like donors are starting to like turn around, like, is everything okay back there?

SPEAKER_00 8:14

And somebody had to go up to him and be like, maybe you should just close this window for now until you kind of sort out the issues with their quiet conversations and their coffee, and he's screaming.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Yeah, yeah. And he had no sense of like how no how quiet it was where he was, because he had these headphones on and all he could hear was a hundred children playing organized games with a megaphone in the background.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Right, right. Did you ever get any feedback from the donors about that experience? Because I'm like, again, sometimes I remember being in the news booth, right? And it feels absolutely chaotic. And then you look at the on-air product, you're like, you would never know. That's great. Did did you get any kind of sense that they knew how chaotic it was for you?

SPEAKER_01 8:56

I don't really know uh kind of the results of the donor feedback survey that happened afterwards, um, or how the the team really felt, like because it was a it was a donor appreciation team that was putting it on. Um but what I do know is that there was talk of the second year that we would be doing this party. And I also know that the second year never came. So that was probably probably a sign of about how how well it went. Great idea. Just uh just a little just too too many hiccups.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Well, and again, it's it was a great idea, but it was also a grand idea. And some you know, when you when you have something that is more complicated in nature, you're just inserting more opportunities for risk and error and all those types of things. So now that you because obviously you were a fundraiser for a long time, now you help other fundraisers maybe uh avoid some of these pitfalls that you have had to go through yourself, right? Um is there a lesson to be learned here about wanting to create a grand experience while also realizing like, hey, what are the risks, right? Like, should we really be going live or should we have just recorded something kind of like you mentioned? What what would be your lesson there?

SPEAKER_01 10:16

Yeah, I mean, in in this situation, I I think that we probably could have pre-recorded something that was a better quality, um, that would have showed off uh what was happening very clearly. Um I do think it was a it was uh uh ambitious in a good way idea. Yeah, um and sometimes you you have to be willing to go into this unknown um in order to do something new, something exciting, something brave, um, something that that it is uh enhancing the donor experience in a way that nobody else is is doing it. Um and I think we we we were brave, we were bold, we had the right people, we had the right equipment, we we had backups, we were we were ready to go. And the interesting thing it was that communication, as soon as the communication broke down between our team members, ever everything became unraveled, um, because as individuals we could no longer do our job.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Yeah. Okay, I like that. But there's your third plot twist for this episode, which is the lesson is not to not go big. It's that sometimes you just have to take a risk and do it anyway, because you don't uh one of my favorite sayings, which is you you don't lose, you either win or you learn. Uh, is that, you know, you wanted to create an experience for these donors that wasn't the run of the mill. And just because it did not go perfectly to plan doesn't mean that it didn't have impact or that you never know how those donors felt about the effort that you put in and how much that could have just meant to them, regardless of the end product, right? Being in that mindset probably is something that you need to be to really create memorable, meaningful moments for people rather than a rinse and repeat strategy.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Yeah, absolutely. And and if you asked, there are probably five people really involved in that production, all physically in different places with different responsibilities. And if you asked each of us to recount this event, we would probably all share it a little bit differently with our own takeaways. The exciting thing to me is that those five people, they're all like um at different major charities now, uh in in in leadership positions, um helping to run fundraising in uh all all over in different sectors, um, or for different causes. Um and they've all brought their experience from that event over somewhere new and and their perspective on like how do I how do I do something that's brave and new while understanding that there's some risk involved.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Thanks for sharing that that feedback too, because I feel like someone might hear that story and go, oh man, do I need to pair back my next, you know, great grand idea for an appeal or a donor experience? And it sounds like you've been through it, and the answer is still no. You would still be brave and and move forward. And maybe that's just somebody, yeah, something someone needs to hear today. So thank you for bringing that story and that lesson to our podcast.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Yeah, thank you for making it it possible for for us to share, you know, the the stories and and experiences that we've been through. Um I I think it's it's so valuable to learn from from uh from other people's experiences. Um and so I think thanks for making this possible.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Absolutely. I totally agree. I having worked with nonprofits for so many years, uh, you know, I said when I started this podcast, I know those stories are out there. I know we can all relate to this stuff. We just need a platform where we can all share. It's kind of like, you know, the podcast version of the group chat. So here we are, and I'm so glad that you were here today. So everybody out there listening, this is your weekly reminder to hydrate and practice self care. And as David and his team did, be brave. You've got this. Can't wait to see you guys for the next episode. Take care. Have a wonderful rest of your week.

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