After The Shifties Liveathon

When I first looked at putting on a 24-hour live stream a year ago, I had never intended for it to be either a charity event or one to support mental health. I had always wanted to ensure the event’s impact was high, but it was going to be more business and marketing focused. 

However, with the last year being such a huge challenge for society and the turn of the year being so hard mentally for us all, I just had to activate this idea and make it into something broader and support a charity that reflected those issues. 

So, it was decided; we would be doing this Liveathon, and it would be to support CPSL Mind, our chosen charity – but when? Well, what better platform for this event than Blue Monday, not because we wanted to buy into this concept of the “most depressing day of the year”, but to combat the idea and reinvent this day as a positive light for the future instead. Blue Monday itself was a concept first developed by a travel company in 2005 and was a marketing campaign used to sell holidays. Since then, it has become associated with this horrible sense of impending doom – not anymore! 

With almost 20,000 views of our live streams combined across the 24 hours, almost £5,000 raised for the charity and the feedback received around how uplifting and impactful it was, we feel we did the right thing here. 

What did we learn? 
No matter how much you plan before these events; you have to go with the flow of the speakers! With almost 40 guests joining me, I had prepared mentally for what I wanted to talk to them about, but I soon realised by speaker number 4, that the work we had done before to frame the event, had been done for us. They were more than willing to share their stories and did not need too much from me to prompt them. The challenge quickly became much more about managing my own emotion and supporting them through that moment.   

Another lesson I picked up from this was sustaining my energy. It quickly became a key focus and what I found worked for me was that in the short 4-minute breaks I had to move, stretch, stick my head out the window and eat little and often. I reached out to the Shifties Community for advice; however, there is always so much conflicting advice regarding diet. For me, it was smoothies, coffee, nuts and a nice care package from Elsie May’s for lunch was superb to snack on throughout the day.  Oh don’t forget the Mrs D’s Doughnut for the evening!

The final lesson I learned was more of a reminder. You need to ask if you want people to do something! When I saw momentum slowing on the viewers, I asked and reminded those watching to like, comment, share and do what they could to keep this at the top of the Facebook feed locally. Shortly after getting a result or two with this, I kept pushing hard on this message and then naturally, the donations followed from the value they got when they arrived.