Taking Viewers on a Virtual Walk to End Bladder Cancer
Cloud-based live solutions, LiveU Studio + Dizplai Enable Cost-Effective Remote Production
Background
The Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network (BCAN), a national nonprofit organization devoted to supporting patients and advancing bladder cancer research, hosts an annual walk to raise funds for its efforts, which support those impacted by the disease. To address the pandemic, the organization shifted from live in-person walks on the local and national level to one large virtual walk. (BCAN subsequently continued creating a fully virtual 1-day event at a national level in addition to local walks during May, Bladder Cancer Awareness Month.)
It was important for the organization to maintain a connection with people even though they wouldn’t be onsite, while also assuring those affected by bladder cancer felt supported and informed about the cause. Providing live streamed coverage of the entire walk with an immersive, interactive experience afforded a new level of awareness and engagement.
The Challenge
It was imperative that BCAN engage with an expansive audience and leverage social media to not only distribute the stream, but also to fundraise and interact with viewers. As a nonprofit, the organization needed to be mindful of their spend – creating the awareness in a cost-effective way so they could reserve their funds for the cause itself. In order to produce the content in a cost-effective way, BCAN was introduced to production house, Social180Group, who then presented a remote production workflow solution that promised to keep operational costs down, while bringing in the best talent and teams from all over the globe to pull off the multi-camera, simulcast live event.
The Solution
The remote production workflow featured LiveU Studio, an all-in-one cloud-based solution, which powered the multicast special live streams to several destinations (Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) and enabled interactions with experts remotely. Additionally, LiveU Studio provided a complete solution for the Social180Group to deliver custom live streams of the BCAN virtual walk equipped with graphic templates, logos, sponsor logos, titles, and more.
Unlimited Creativity
The cloud-based workflow provided great flexibility. A variety of content was fed into the live production including VOD, live interviews, pictures, and testimonials. An integration partnership between LiveU Studio and Dizplai brought the live graphics and engagement platform into the mix to provide dynamic, interactive, data-rich live content as the main graphics engine, which helped hold the audience’s attention by displaying a L-Bar overlay showcasing social media comments in real-time on the live stream. The host would take a social media shoutout moment between playback segments to highlight comments. This was pushed from the Dizplai side via BCAN social media marcom manager to show up online.
The broadcast featured live and recorded videos of walk participants from all over the country, musical performances by bladder cancer patients and caregivers, as well as cameo appearances by bladder cancer doctors, patients and advocates.
“It was exciting to see the numbers go up incrementally during the live program. We saw sponsors on the live stream interacting in the chat. That’s important for the partners in the healthcare community that BCAN works with. There is a human element that these technologies helped bring together and convey in a compelling way.” – John Porterfield, producer for Social180Group.
Unparalleled Cost-Savings
The live production spanned two continents and multiple remote locations. The talent, producer, technical director, and graphics crew member worked out of their home offices. By removing the need to travel everyone to the site, the organization saved significantly on operational costs.
“We couldn’t have done this at the level it was produced – or for the costs associated with a traditional onsite production. The cloud-based workflow gave us the flexibility and creativity to produce a high-quality live program that reached global audiences. Working with a talented team produced an amazing final product.”
Mark Story – Communications Director for BCAN
“With LiveU Studio, we discovered a powerful, customizable, and accessible live content creation tool. The platform gave us remote solutions to keep supporting and informing our community easily when we couldn’t bring everyone on location. We’ve been able to create live streams with remote guests and broadcast our feed to multiple social network pages at once, which has helped us drive even more awareness of our efforts.”
Mark Story, Communications Director for BCAN