As someone who was very involved in student organizations during my studies at uOttawa, I had an interesting perspective on how the pandemic affected hosting events. As soon as the country shut down, people had already started looking into ways to reimagine their canceled events into an online format. I was involved in two major events at the time, that were abruptly canceled after the pandemic. One being the Student Life Awards hosted by CVUO and the other STEAM Fest hosted by uOttawa STEAM. For STEAM fest the team looked into a few options on how they could host their event online, after all the event is a series of workshops, but eventually opted for canceling the event due to the lack of interest in an online event – which ended up being one of the biggest hurdles for everyone going forward.
For the Student Life Awards, an awards show for all student clubs on campus, canceling was not really an option. There were still people interested in knowing the results, but what transpired was hardly an event and just a 40-minute-long video with different presenters simply announcing the winners. While this was a nice experience for the team that had worked so hard on the event, it still wasn’t really an event.
For a few months after most events ended up being different versions of a Zoom call and sometimes just a Zoom call. And how well they did was entirely dependant on the content of those calls. If you had good speakers’ people would come and if not, then probably not. That and some preliminary marketing ended up being really all online events ended up becoming.
It wasn’t until the year after, where we started to see some real innovation. People started using platforms like Gather.Town, hosting game shows and other interactive ideas to make things more interesting.
For me, I noticed that the one thing that resulted in the success of an online event was if it was able to deliver its base value to its attendees still. Sort of like the minimum viable product of the event. So, for example, speaker and academic events could still do well, because the minimum value was listening to the speakers that could easily be transferred over to an online environment. We hosted online Clubs Fairs, which were pretty much impossible to replicate online since the base value was catching students as they walked by your table or for students to hit up a table on their way to class. Things that weren’t easily made possible online.
We tried to take inspiration from large award shows that happened during the pandemic. The first one on our radar that happened after the pandemic was the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of how they went about it. Those winning already knew they had won and were sent their trophies ahead of time. The winners sent back recorded videos to be featured on the live show, which was hosted by Victoria Justice. This ended up being kind of boring to watch and everything felt shallow and scripted. The excitement of seeing your favourite celebrities win an award and freak out about it wasn’t there.
The next award show that caught our attention was the Emmys. A person would be stationed outside of the houses of all the nominees and when the winner was announced during the live show, the person would either present the award or just leave.
This ended up being a much nicer watch and kind of outlined the base value of award shows. The suspense and excitement of watching your favorites win the award live, getting their reactions and their off-the-cuff acceptance speeches as they do their best to hold back their excitement.
Our awards show was scheduled to be hosted on March 14th, 2021, as a sort of memoir to SLA2020 which was scheduled to happen on March 14th, 2020 and would mark the 1 year anniversary of the school shutting down due to the pandemic. We start planning the event the summer before, however. At the start of our planning, we were hopeful that we would be able to host the event in person by the time March came around, but a few months in, and the pandemic not going anywhere, we eventually lost hope and started thinking of online options.
Bringing the awards to the nominees and winners was definitely something we wanted to do but didn’t have the resources the Emmys’ had to station someone at every nominee’s house. One thing from the early pandemic that also inspired our final idea was the graduation ceremonies that some teachers did for their graduating class, where they had a sort of car parade in the town, and drove past the houses of graduating students. We joked about renting a bus and driving the ceremonies to everyone’s houses.
Combining that with what the Emmys’ did was how we came up with our final product. We would host the ceremonies online, but during the show, we would also send out a handful of cars in the city and hand-deliver the trophies to the winners as they won. This way we were able to save on resources since one person could hit 5 or 6 houses, instead of the Emmy’s one person per house, and no one was stationed outside anyone’s house for nothing.
This covered our base value of getting the reactions of everyone winning their awards live, they got to give their acceptance speeches while holding their trophies and many nominees also had everyone gather at one place and we were able to replicate the feeling of winning an award surrounded by friends.
The whole thing also added an unplanned feature being the constant vlogging of all the delivery people as they drove around the city on strict timelines delivering trophies. This provided a lot of candid entertainment to fill in between people winning awards, somewhat similar to talking to your table during an actual award show.
Finally, using OBS, Zoom, Hopin, and some creative thinking we were also able to present the online ceremony in a professional manner that was levels above a typical Zoom call.
Finally, using OBS, Zoom, Hopin, and some creative thinking we were also able to present the online ceremony in a professional manner that was levels above a typical Zoom call.
The logistics of the whole thing were insane, and I plan to write another article about that, but the main idea here is after we broke down the event to the minimum of what people wanted from award shows and then built on top of that we were able to find our golden idea. The event ended up being a huge success. The concept itself was entertaining to the viewers - and many of the attendees decided to join the team afterward.