One of the new additions to the July 23 WordFest Live is live human captioning. While we’re excited to bring in this element that makes our event more accessible for all attendees, it does come at a cost, particularly when you consider it’s a 24-hour global event.
To cover the cost, we’ve opened up sponsorship opportunities — 6, one for each continent on our schedule — for individuals and companies to step in and help out.
How This Sponsorship Benefits Your Business
Interested? Sure! Who doesn’t want to help a mental health charity make the event more accessible, right? And while that covers the feel good side, as a business owner, you’re likely wondering how this positively benefits your business.
Great question!
1 – Prominent Location
When you sponsor captioning, you get your brand front and center across both stages within an entire region. Whether captions are open or closed, your logo sits prominently below the window of both sessions. If they’re looking at their screen, they’re seeing your business.
2 – Saturated Visibility
By having your brand consistently under the session screen across both stages, your visual exposure throughout the event and each talk is in one of the highest visible locations. Your logo stays in front of all attendees watching all sessions for your selected continent.
3 – Excellent Value
With the wide coverage and saturated visibility, you receive excellent value for money. Each sponsorship option has it’s benefits, but if you’re looking for a low-touch way to be seen by a global audience, this is the right choice for you. Plus, in a community that cares about accessibility efforts, there can only be additional benefits to having your company linked as one who cares.
The Nuts and Bolts of How It Works
Now that we’ve looked at what the benefits are to you, let’s dive into what this all looks like, practically speaking.
The video below shows how your sponsorship will look during the event. Just imagine your logo in place of Post Status’ and you’ll see how even if the attendee closes the captioning, you’re still prominently displayed. As noted above, if they’re looking at the screen, they’re looking at you.
Take a look for yourself. Remember, where Post Status is shown, your logo would be:
Provide Benefit to All Attendees
The last question you might have is whether this actually matters to all attendees or just a small subset. It’s a good question that we answer more in depth when we announced why we were using live human captioning, and it’s well worth summing up again.
Live human captioning benefits all attendees by:
- Providing technical accuracy
- It’s attention to the speaker’s or subject’s nuance
- How it overcomes the challenges of language differences
We could have used AI for the captioning, but humans do a higher quality job with all of the above. As well, accents, dialects, different speech patterns, and localized vocabulary can all be challenging for AI to handle, often with humorous, if not embarrassing, results. A serious consideration with a global event.
Brian Richards, Events Producer at WPSessions, sums it up well:
Captioning is an important part of delivering experiences that are accessible to everyone. At this point, I can’t imagine running an event without them!
I personally appreciate videos with captions because they help me to focus better, but there are plenty of situations I can think of that make them more necessary than many people think. Perhaps someone is in a loud environment, or they missed what a speaker said, or they’re a non-native English speaker, or they have any level of hearing loss.
Some of these situations are temporary, some are permanent, and captions ensure that none of these reasons exclude someone from experiencing the event.
Sponsoring Our Live Human Captioning
Ready to take one of the remaining sponsor slots? Excellent!! Head over to the WordFest Live call for sponsors and sign up for yours today. Regions go on a first come, first served basis so if you have a particular one in mind, get it soon.
Interested in being seen across more than one region? Let the Sponsor Team know when you talk to them and they will give you the special package price for selecting more than one continent!
Whether you take one or many, don’t miss out on the low-touch benefits of having your business highly visible across our global stages.
Big Orange Heart