Selby High School Selby High School Virtual Open Evening Innovation

The Challenge

Selby High School, based just outside Leeds, was on the lookout for doing their open evening a little differently. Therefore, due to the obvious restrictions in 2020, they wanted to still get as much engagement and continue to be oversubscribed, but weren’t sure how to do it other than in its traditional physical form. The forward-thinking Principal, Nick Hinchcliffe got in touch during the Summer holidays with the hope that with our extensive experience, we could help to shape a new, exciting way of holding open evenings in the form of a Selby virtual open evening event.

Digital Design & Development

Event branding and design

Presentation design assets

Event microsite

Holding animation

Pre recorded presentations

Broadcast direction and streaming

The Solution

After numerous virtual events that have been produced by Clearhead we decided to produce, what we felt was the right balance between, technical, safeguarding, getting the right information across and the online legacy. This time it was needed to appeal to parents and also a much younger target audience, 8-11 year olds. Partnering up with professional broadcast software in the shape of OBS, Clearhead embarked on putting together an online ‘production’ for the Selby Virtual Open Evening Event.

• Firstly we pre-recorded a selection of teachers and support staff, as well as a couple of star students allowed Selby to be safe in the knowledge that there wouldn’t be any technical issues, as well as the opportunity to check everything before it went ‘live’.

• Secondly we produced stunning new content. With no way to physically show the students around the School, we came up with the novel way to have two tour films as well as a ‘welcome to Selby’ introduction, all presented by the charismatic Principal. We produced new idents and graphical elements to have a uniformed approach for each.

• Thirdly we utilised the very versatile YouTube as the delivery platform and also the main Q&A platform. Questions came in regularly throughout the 3 hour event. These were then answered by the Schools ‘moderators’.

• Next we added live ‘links’ into allow momentum and a reason to watch. This helped to update with the latest information and helped add useful segments to create a joined-up event.

• Finally we set up a legacy ‘virtual open event’ page which also housed a website chat function which allowed interaction to signpost correctly and made sure the ROI was huge.