Engaging schools with Read for Good

We at STORM EVENTS love to work with long-term clients, and we’re proud to support charity Read for Good with an ongoing series of virtual events. Read for Good provides books to schools and hospitals, funded via donations.

Alongside a series of live activities, it hosts webinars for schools with world-class children’s authors in “Readathons”. Authors such as David Baddiel, Lauren Child, Michael Rosen and Emma Carroll broadcast from their homes, reading their books on screen with children reading along in schools.

Anchored by senior STORM VIRTUAL operator Matt Rowbottom from our studio in Peterborough, we manage the whole technical process through each webinar and beyond. Taking complete charge of this process, Matt conducts a 30-minute technical check with the webinar organisers, host and author, sometimes done in a pre-meeting. This includes checking the look of the author’s home, camera shot and audio to ensure all will be perfect for the webinar. He then manages all technical elements through the virtual event, which is unscripted and requires content to be pushed to the webinar on demand. This includes music, video content and book covers shown through PowerPoint.

Engagement with the young audience is crucial, and the children take part in a Zoom Q&A session with the host and guest author, with both live and pre-submitted questions from teachers, moderated by Read for Good.

Hundreds of schools connect to the event, and with around 30 children watching on each connection we stream to thousands of young viewers. Because of these audience numbers Matt will copy and paste hundreds of submitted questions for moderation. As he says -

''Really interesting, fun event…Of all the calls we do this one has the most questions and it is therefore fast and takes quick management and multi-tasking.”

Another fun element is an online quiz managed through Zoom Polls.

‘’Using Zoom is a great way to pull all the schools together across the country and make everyone feel part of one event. Zoom is a wonderful vehicle to bring everyone together''

All of this creates a terrific online experience for so many children, who would not normally have access to such amazing authors in their own classrooms. In addition to managing the live broadcast, we record the webinar and create a replay video with a full statistical report post-event.

Our level of experience and expertise means that STORM VIRTUAL takes away client’s stress by dealing with all technical elements and this only reinforces our premier position as an industry leader in delivering virtual events.

Justine Daniels, CEO, Read for Good - "Read for Good has used STORM EVENTS for many of its live broadcast events to schools in recent years, helping us to bring the magic of books and stories to children and young people in schools and hospitals across the UK. STORM's technical expertise means we can concentrate on creating the best possible experience for the many thousands of schools and pupils participating in our events. Bringing a celebrated author or illustrator into classrooms is a wonderful way to inspire a life-changing love of reading, and STORM helps us achieve this for schools and hospitals all over the UK.”

Our engagement as trusted partners to this terrific charity complements our more-common corporate activities, and we’re looking forward to creating even more amazing virtual events for Read for Good

Get in touch to discuss your virtual event today.