International Womens Day Facebook Live

The live stream was hosted for International Women’s Day on Facebook Live. The live stream featured representatives from Government Equalities Office, London Business School and CMI for a special Facebook Live panel for a discussion about equality in the workplace.

During the live stream the audience was invited to contribute their experiences about equality in the workplace through a live poll where they were invited to comment with an emoji as a response to a question.

Objectives.

This was their first ever live stream and they wanted to use it to launch a discussion about gender bias for International Women’s Day in a more immersive way.

What we did.

We felt the best way for the male viewers to truly understand gender bias was by experiencing it, even for a short moment. We have actually had the technical capabilities to do this type of stream since 2016, so we were really excited to finally have a great reason to use it. The live stream took place at IQ studios in Westminster, London. We used a professional studio camera, audio and lighting setup with one sofa and TV screens were used behind the panelists to display images related to the ‘Broken Windows’ report done by CMI.

The style of this event was a panel discussion with one host, so this dictated the studio setup that was used. It’s important to have a good leader in a discussion like this and a good range of panelists who have interesting stories to tell. The host had some pre-written questions for each panellist to ensure everyone had a chance to speak.

The CMI social team used Groovy Gecko’s Question Moderation System which takes questions that the viewers have posted on the stream and allows the client to review them before sending them to a device that the panel leader can see. The two streams were setup on a pair of encoders, with a backup for each as well.

Visually it was important for the streaming engineer to see each stream on a separate monitor so that it was clear which was which to avoid any confusion. Within our Facebook App we were then able to create the different streams. During the live stream when the time of disruption approached, the team were ready for the switch, but the final cue came from the host to ensure a seamless, logical experience for everyone as she explained what was going on.

People started to comment on the live stream soon after the disruption began, and this sparked important discussions between viewers. Towards the end of the live stream, a different experience was delivered to the men who watched versus women who were watching. The live stream that men saw was disrupted to reflect the issue that the gender pay gap at manager level is 26.8% as reported in their Broken Windows special report. This was explained by the host of the live stream and it was a very powerful visual way to represent the difference in pay for men and women in the UK.

watch the full stream.