With a national lockdown looming, we immediately knew we had to look at alternatives for our planned events, and set out testing some livestream equipment for the annual I Love Clarkston Community Awards. What happened next wasn't exactly intended...
On 17 March, to test the livestream, we went for a simple approach - we held a short quiz on our own personal Facebook profile (which went very well, if we don't say so ourselves). The following day, Glasgow Live got in touch and ran a piece on what went down (read that article here). Following the success of that quiz, and in between messages of support from people who were happy to have a little bit of a distraction from the 'real world', we got in touch with our good friends at Gigs in Scotland and held a similar event on their platform - which went down a storm, and this time had a good few thousand people tuning in. The next day, we took a call from someone at the BBC who had seen the quizzes and the Glasgow Live article and asked us to appear on the One Show to present a quiz to former MP Ed Balls and the Pub Landlord himself, Al Murray!
At this point, we knew we had to do something a little different if these quizzes were to continue, and such, The Stayin' Inn was born! We prepped the graphics and published the social media channels so that they were ready for our on-screen appearance and the rest, as they say, is history!
We are now at the end of September (I know!), and we have hosted well over 100 public online events, presented private events for corporate clients, appeared on many, many podcasts, started a very active online community group and raised well over £50,000 for various charities along the way. Oh, and not to mention our very own lockdown dating show, which spawned it's own social media channels and has received interest from media outlets in Australia and the USA, including a request to host versions of the show for US colleges!
Although this journey wasn't the path we intended, we have learned an immense amount and have been able to produce some fantastic content from our makeshift studio in our home office. There's no doubt the virtual element is here to stay for a while, so we're glad to be where we are with it!
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