Using collaborative innovation to shine a spotlight on the social good tech entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
We’ve had the opportunity to partner with many incredible organizations, helping them with their transition to virtual events, but few bring the kinds of the opportunities and challenges offered by Digital4Good, an inspirational social good + tech innovation competition from #ICANHELP.
#ICANHELP empowers student changemakers and promotes digital safety using curriculum to transform current and future generations of students to make a positive impact when using social media and digital technology. They have trained over 450,000 and impacted 12.4 million students!
While the event industry has been adapting to a “new normal”, we are happy that as an already established virtual media company we’ve been able to alleviate some of the growing pains that accompany trying something new.
In Person to Virtual Live Stream
We were lucky enough to partner with Kim Karr, Executive Director and Co-founder, and her team for their 4th annual Digital4Good Summit April 20-23, 2021. This was an event full of firsts for both Matchbox and #ICANHELP, and together we stepped into uncharted territory.
“The Matchbox Partner Success Team always brought an infectious positive, can-do attitude.”
-Kim Karr, Co-Founder #ICANHELP
The Digital4Good Summit was a four day event celebrating students who are using digital technology to make a positive impact in their communities. The spotlight shines on students showcasing their innovation and leadership, demonstrating to the world just what kids and teens can do with the right tools, education and encouragement.
This year’s event was sponsored by TikTok, Providence, Work2BeWell, Twitter, VSCO, Aaron Judge All Rise Foundation, Google, FlyForm, Supercell, My Digital Tat2, and Born Unbreakable, and showcased 9 student innovators who engaged in a Shark Tank style competition, complete with pitches, mentors, and live audience-voting for the winner! The first three days of the Digital4Good Summit allowed the students to pitch their innovations to Sharks, choose a Shark to mentor them and perfect their pitches for the Power Hour on the final day. The 4th day of the Digital4Good event consisted of a Mental Health panel discussion, the final student pitches, a Digital Wellness panel discussion, a moving performance by Judith Franklin singing Hero by Mariah Carey, and the announcement of the audience-elected winner!
“We had hosted the Digital4Good Summit the past 3 years in person, and now we had to adapt to the virtual world to share the content and winning students’ achievements with thousands of people all over the world. Matchbox provided a solid foundation made up of virtual event planning experience, best practices, and resources that allowed us to confidently co-create a live-streamed event for an audience of schools, students, and stakeholders that suddenly stretched across the country and around the world. As many as 100,000 people or more!”
-Kim Karr, Co-Founder #ICANHELP
The Journey to Live Streaming to 100,000 attendees
Now, we’ve done a LOT of cool things, but we’d never hosted 100,000 attendees before! So, we reached out to our friends at All Together Now and asked for their help. They brought their extensive experience producing live-switched, complex multi-stream video and graphic feeds for large audiences, and, all together (pun intended), we compiled the elements needed for a professionally produced live event and prepared the speakers for the experience.
“We knew the event needed to be produced live so the student pitches would feel authentic and mirror as closely as possible our more traditional live experience. Our viewer reach was greater than expected. And as an added bonus is that all four days of Digital4Good are still available for anyone to watch on YouTube Live.”
-Kim Karr, Co-Founder #ICANHELP
Partnering with #ICANHELP for their Digital4Good event was a challenging, co-creative, innovative, and incredibly heart-warming experience. We’ve never before helped power such a large event and we definitely had our work cut out for us. By leaning into our values of Including, Co-creating, Perfecting, and Human, we were able to pull off an incredibly fun and successful program that brought together a community, elevated the work of inspiring individuals, and taught us all a lot along the way!
Bringing people together to do good with technology through innovation and collaboration? That’s Matchbox.
Have a unique event challenge of your own? Let’s talk!
Conversations that matter. Connections that last.