How to Successfully Livestream for Your Lawyers Association
February 2021
Introduction / Summary
New York County Lawyer's Association is a non-profit bar association that seeks to educate and provide charitable help to their community. They were founded in 1908 and became one of the first bar associations to support diversity in the legal field.
The Challenge
Every year NYCLA hosts an award ceremony to honor and celebrate exemplary members in the legal profession. Unfortunately, during the beginning of 2021 there were still many limitations due to COVID-19 and NYCLA could not do their award ceremony in-person.
Luckily one of NYCLA's members had seen a previous virtual gala our team had created for another organization and referred us to produce this virtual event. NYCLA reached out to our team to pivot their in-person awards ceremony into a virtual one and we were more than happy to help make that happen!
How do you award exemplary members of your organization when your in-person award ceremony gets cancelled due to COVID?
The Solution
Our team has successfully completed numerous virtual events since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We knew we could honor 190 members for this awards ceremony, but the question remained how? Our team does not do boring, we strive to ensure all elements of the show are unique, memorable, and captivating. This show was no different.
Our first task was to decide on the branding for the award show. We provided the client with some samples and they chose the design they liked best. From that design we began to create the invitations for NYCLA members and honorees. We also created the three main webpages for the awards ceremony:
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Registration Page
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Check-in Page for day-of show
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Live-stream Page that houses the show
Then we started tackling the most important part of the show, the awards ceremony. We wanted to ensure all members that were being awarded felt recognized in a special and memorable way through the virtual format. The awards were meant to recognize authors of the ten-volume treatise Commercial Litigation in New York State Courts, 5th Edition. So we thought, what better way to award authors of a ten-volume book than by displaying their names on an animated book that looks like the one they wrote? So we did just that, and the authors could not be happier with the unique presentation of their names.
And there's an added bonus:
We were able to combine pre-recorded material with live in-person segments!
Live and
Pre-record Special Guests
One important part of the night was the pre-show segment with Don Q. It was a great way to thank all the sponsors and create a fun environment before the show. The live segment connected Miami, New Orleans, and New York together in a single night!
NYCLA members were also honored to have former Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, speak LIVE during the night of the event. Our team was able to mesh the pre-recorded content with the live segments.
This just added to the already amazing content and design of the pre-recorded videos. No one was able to recognize what segments were live or pre-recorded because both sections displayed content seamlessly.
Deliverables
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Invitations
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Virtual Gala Website
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Program and Sponsors Booklet
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Show Production
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Live Stream Production of
Pre-Recorded and Live Content
Cohesive
Event Branding
The event branding was prominent throughout the show, from the invitations to the event gala website.
Program and
Sponsor Booklet
It's important to give event sponsors love for their donations. A program and sponsors booklet is the perfect opportunity for that. The booklet is placed on the webpage that houses the live stream so viewers can have easy access to it. NYCLA also wanted the pages of the booklet to link to the sites of each sponsor that donates, this was also a great incentive for their sponsors to include their names in the journal.
Show Production
We made the live stream look like a cohesive, well branded, show with animated graphics that included:
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Countdown to the live stream
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Animated show logo
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Timeline of NYCLA's organization
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Transitions
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Titles
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Lower Thirds
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Call to Action/Donate
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Programs of NYCLA
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Credits/Sponsors
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Stream cover and ending graphics
Live Stream Production
To watch the whole virtual gala
click the video below!
Results
All the award recipients were proud to be honored in this virtual event! They loved how unique the presentation was and how easy it was to share their moment with their loved ones.
There was great feedback from all the members and sponsors! They were proud to be a member of NYCLA.
This awards ceremony exemplified everything that NYCLA wanted and they are able to use all the content to share with their existing members and also grow their members and communities.
