As a “Hybrid Virtual Event”, the 2022 Annual General Meeting of the charity Hospice Africa allowed stakeholders and those giving presentations the option of travelling in person to the host venue just outside Liverpool City Centre, or to attend virtually via livestream. Considering many of those involved live or are located in Uganda, the hybrid virtual event model creates possibilities that would either be impossible, impractical or prohibitively expensive otherwise. The reduction in travel not only saves the charity and its volunteers money, but it also reduces their carbon footprint.
The setup in the room consisted of a main camera at the rear and a secondary camera facing the audience so that remote attendees could see clearly those raising hands to propose and second motions and appointments during the business stage of the meeting. The two camera feeds, along with a third feed from the big screen at the front, were mixed live and streamed to YouTube. Those watching live were able to write questions and comments in the Live Chat, which were then instantly visible to the presenter up the front via a tablet computer.
As well as presentations from those physically in the room, Innobella Media facilitated remote presenters who joined the proceedings via Zoom to give their presentations and either share their screen (which was shown on the TV in the room) or have a secondary presenter in the room in Liverpool click through the PowerPoint presentation as they spoke. Those in the room could hear them clearly through the TV speakers (as it was a small enough room to not require a separate PA system) and the direct HDMI feed from the laptop hosting the zoom call being fed into our vision mixer meant those watching live via YouTube also had a direct feed to hear the remote presenters clearly.
In addition to facilitating the connection of interested parties in multiple locations around the globe, the hybrid live event model for a meeting of this nature means that the charity’s trustees have a permanent record of the entire meeting via the option to replay the livestream on demand, which is useful for ensuring a meeting’s minutes are accurate and do not miss any important details.
About Hospice Africa
Hospice Africa provides palliative care to patients and palliative care training for providers across Africa. In order to do this, they have created a model with their clinical headquarters in Kampala, Uganda, where they manufacture morphine, treat patients and run their education programmes. Students from all parts of Africa enrol in their palliative care study programmes in order to carry on the work done at Hospice in their respective countries. The idea is that this model can be replicated and provide much needed palliative care across all of Africa.
