Livestreaming with Whisper
Thank you for thinking about streaming for Whisper. As well as contributing to a great cause, livestream fundraising can help to raise the profile of musicians, performers, and gamers - or it can just be an opportunity for an online party!
Whisper runs a children’s hospital and maternity unit in Jinja, Uganda, in an area where healthcare is all too often unaffordable, unavailable or unsafe because of poor infrastructure.
Our hospital is a happy, caring, child-friendly place providing high-quality healthcare 24x7. We have a social worker and a nutritionist on the staff so that we can follow through where a child's circumstances may be contributing to their ill-health. Check our great reviews on Facebook and Google.
We make the funds you raise work really hard!
We don't know any other charity that saves more lives than we do, for a given donation. $28.54 allows us, on average, to treat a patient. This figure includes many patients such as burns and malnutrition cases who spend weeks at the hospital. $382 allows us to treat 13 patients and in doing that, we estimate that we save a life that would not otherwise have been saved. To find out how we arrived at those figures, see our page about impact. Our administration and fundraising outside Uganda are all done by volunteers, making the money you raise go even further.
Previous livestreams for Whisper
In December 2020, musicians at a research organization in Germany held a lovely livestream concert on YouTube in aid of Whisper. Some of Whisper's staff watched the concert live from Uganda.
In February 2021 a gamer kindly held a 6-hour fundraiser on Twitch for Whisper.
Fundraising platforms you can use
You can use Tiltify or Streamlabs Charity for fundraising. Both platforms work with YouTube,Twitch and Facebook. Streamlabs Charity charges zero fees. Tiltify provides some extra features, and charges a 5% fee. On both platforms, the donations are sent directly to Whisper via PayPal.
Streamlabs Charity provides you with a fundraising page, and some graphical overlays for your live video stream:
- Donation alerts, which appear whenever somebody donates. They consist of a graphic (often an animated cartoon GIF), a sound, a message that can include the donor's name and the amount given, and any message from the donor. You can set up different alerts for different donation sizes.
- A goal widget, which shows progress towards the fundraising goal
- A donation ticker, which scrolls the most recent donations across the screen
All these overlays are optional and can be highly {snippet us|customised|customized}. You can see an example of a donation alert and a goal widget in the image below. If you're new to Streamlabs, or to livestreaming in general, their documentation is here and there are useful "beginners' guide" videos in Streamlabs' YouTube channel, which is here.
Tiltify provides extra features for audience participation:
- rewards - these are "services" of some kind that can be purchased, for example displaying the donor's name on a Post-It note in the background, answering a question, playing a requested piece of music
- polls - these are audience polls which you pay to answer, for example "is pineapple an appropriate topping for a pizza", and they can lead to competition between the various answers
- milestones - these show as blue and white circles on the campaign progress bar, and they mark something that will happen when a certain amount has been raised. If you click the milestone on the screen you can see the details.
For gamers and musicians, the features provided by Streamlabs Charity may be enough. For streamers with ambitious fundraising goals, particularly DJs, people with radio/TV hosting skills and professional fundraisers, or streamers who just like to party, Tiltify may be the best choice. If you think your audience might object to Tiltify's 5% fee then we may be able to arrange for a donor to cover the fees for your livestream.
We can provide video from Uganda
We can provide live or pre-recorded video from Uganda. Although Whisper's hospital is open 24 hours, live video is easiest during the Ugandan day or early evening, say from 9am to 7pm. Uganda's time zone is East Africa Time (UTC+3), so this translates as shown in the table below. This table is just a guide and we might be able to go live for you outside these hours; feel free to ask.
Preferred times for live video from Uganda
| Region | Time Zone | Relative to UTC/GMT | Earliest Time | Latest Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US East coast (winter) | EST | -5 | 01:00 | 11:00 |
| US East coast (summer) | EDT | -4 | 02:00 | 12:00 |
| US West coast (winter) | PST | -8 | 22:00 | 08:00 |
| US West coast (summer) | PDT | -7 | 23:00 | 09:00 |
| Central Europe (winter) | CET | +1 | 07:00 | 17:00 |
| Central Europe (summer) | CEST | +2 | 08:00 | 18:00 |
| UK (winter) | GMT | 0 | 06:00 | 16:00 |
| UK (summer) | BST | +1 | 07:00 | 17:00 |
| Sydney, Australia (winter) | AEST | +10 | 16:00 | 02:00 |
| Sydney, Australia (summer) | AEDT | +11 | 17:00 | 03:00 |
Giveaways
We can provide pre-paid DonorSee gift cards free of charge to give out to your audience. These cards pay for a direct donation to any of Whisper's projects on DonorSee. They will get to see Whisper's work in detail and they will receive video feedback on the use of their donation, often very quickly for the smaller projects.
Thank you video
We will provide a thank you video after the fundraising event, to thank you and your audience.
Livestreaming from a phone
Marathon runners and others might want to livestream from a phone. There's an example here of somebody fundraising through a livestream while running in the Manchester Marathon. We're not sure whether mobile reception would be good enough for this at events that draw large crowds, such as the London Marathon. YouTube prevents livestreaming from a phone through their app if your channel has less than 1000 subscribers but third party apps such as Streamlabs don't have this restriction.