2011 Presidential town hall streaming insights
We have streamed events (opens new window) in the past (opens new window) including the presidential town halls (opens new window) so this wasn't anything new. The presidential town hall is an event where President Allan Gilmour provides an update on campus activity and progress achieved in regards to preparing for the upcoming academic year. The target audience for this event is mainly faculty and staff.
Promotion for the event starts with a campus-wide email (opens new window). We collect RSVP's (opens new window) to attend in person and a reminder email to watch live (opens new window) online if you cannot attend. Typically we have the entire video online within minutes of the event but we ran in to some technical issues with Ustream that prevented it.
I just wanted to share a few stats about the number of viewers for this internal event. To give you some context we have roughly 9,800 employees who were the primary audience for the event. We have ~32,000 students, some of which did watch the event but it was not promoted to them specifically.
# Stats about the stream:
- 1 hour running time
- 868 unique viewers (275 last year)
- 559 concurrent viewers
- 583 viewer hours
- 870 chat comments (345 last year)
- 35 questions (20 last year)
- 169 clicks throughs from Twitter (133 last year)
- 48 click throughs from Facebook (35 last year)
- 1,627 unique page views to wayne.edu/live (opens new window) (122 last year)
The event was streamed without ads, something we have been doing for all large scale events. We have found the cost to remove the ads is worth it, specifically with the open chat. With ads the chat consistently turns to discussion about how other institutions are being promoted on our stream.
A second lesson learned during this event was the importance of doing a run through with the actual equipment that is going to be used during the event. Our University Television department streams events on a consistent basis but moving to a new location always introduces new issues. This time we had a small issue with the audio only broadcasting in the left channel. It was still audible but a third of the chat at the start of the event was about the audio, this could have been and will be prevented in future events.