Have Yourself A Merry Remote Christmas

This year we started work on Vito — a platform for running community-first online events. With December fast approaching, we’re thinking about how Vito could be used to make a remote Christmas feel fun and festive.

In this post, we’ll share three creative ideas for how teams can use Vito to celebrate the holiday season remotely. (Spoiler: they’re not all events…)

Video advent calendar

Create a Vito hub. Invite your friends, colleagues or customers. Then release a new piece of video content each day in the lead up to the 25th December. I know, 24 pieces of content sounds like a lot, but they only need to be short and casual. The key is just to have fun with it.

Behind the scenes

Record a teaser of something you’re working on, and see if your audience can figure out what it is. Encourage them to pop their guesses in the discussion feed inside Vito. Then respond to let people know if they’re on the right track.

You could record a “Day in the life” style vlog, and give your audience an insight into what it’s like to be part of your team. Or ask your audience to drop their top FAQs into the discussion area in Vito. Record and share (or live-stream) your answers the next day. 

Team showcase

Take the opportunity to celebrate the people in your team. Their special skills could make great video content. Work with a musician? Ask if they’d like to record a song. Got an avid gamer in your team? Maybe they could review their top 5 games of the year. The possibilities with employee-generated videos are endless, and often make for the most fun and authentic content.

Get creative

You could take a narrative approach and tell a story across 24 short episodes. That way people need to tune in each day to find out what happens next. Bonus points if you can end each episode on a cliffhanger!

Even mundane-seeming tasks can make engaging content when framed right. You could film a time-lapse of yourself doing your yearly clear-out of your office. There are similar videos on YouTube that have thousands of views, because many people find this content therapeutic to watch. If you’re willing to get creative, there’s no shortage of content ideas at your disposal.

Need some extra inspiration? Film a comedy skit. Record a parody of a Christmas song but with lyrics based on what your organization does. Dressing up is highly encouraged! Take inspiration from YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. What kinds of videos do your favourite content creators make? Could you do something like that, even if it’s on a smaller scale?

Keep people coming back

Each day you release a new piece of content in the hub, use Vito’s @hub announcement feature to notify all hub members that there’s something new to see. You can also tease the content across Twitter and your social accounts to let folks know about what you’re doing. Make sure to provide instructions for how to join the hub to see the content in full.

If you like the advent calendar idea, but feel overwhelmed by the prospect of coming up with 24 ideas to film, you could do a similar thing for the 12 Days of Christmas instead. Same concept, but half as many videos to record!

Check out our blog post full of tips for producing engaging video content from home.

Remote Christmas show

Run a live-streamed Christmas-themed show and broadcast it to your Vito hub. Invite your audience to tune in at a specific time — ideally when most of your viewers are likely to be finishing work for the day. The specifics of the itinerary are up to you, but here are some ideas to get you started.

You could do a DJ set of Christmas tunes and encourage people at home to dance like no-one’s watching (because it’s literally true that no one can see them!). In-between, you could tell Christmas jokes or stories or play games. Charades works well — you can act out the clues on camera and folks can submit their answers in the chat. You could even have prizes to send out to the winners.

If you have any budget, you could pay special guests for pre-recorded music performances or live stand-up routines. Host the event like a variety show, with you compèring in between. Cheesy Christmas hats and jumpers, decorations and background lighting will help add to the festive atmosphere. 

You could even do a script read-through on video call, like so many movie casts have been doing in 2020. But go one better and put on your own remote Christmas play! Re-write a familiar story or come up with a new one. Then read it with your colleagues, and broadcast it to your Vito hub. Remember, costumes and props really sell a story. 😉

If that all sounds a bit intense, you could do something more relaxed, like a festive cook-a-long or bake-a-long. Create a page in your Vito hub ahead of time with all the ingredients required. Then run a live-stream showing your audience how to make a dish in real-time and encourage them to follow along. To keep things simple, we’d suggest a plant-based snack, dessert or side-dish that anyone will be able to enjoy.

Year in review

This last idea is a bit more understated than the previous two. So if the thought of hosting a live-streamed party fills you with dread, this one might be more your style.

December is a reflective period, perhaps more so in 2020 than in a typical year. So why not create a “Year in Review” hub? Use it to collect together content that tells the story of your journey over the last 12 months.

Edit together a recap reel of some of the things you’ve worked on as a team throughout the year. Combine video content and pages to paint a more complete picture. Group your content into collections within the hub, for instance if you want to present everything month-by-month. One page could be a “year in numbers” type report, with key stats you want to share. You can collate your best-performing content in one place, such as your most read blog posts or most favorited social media posts.

There are plenty of ways to have fun with this concept. Why not create a music playlist that captures how you felt during each part of the year? You can link to it from a page within the hub. Vito pages support drag and dropped images. So you could tell a visual story by doing a “year in photos”.

Grant virtual “awards” to team members or customers for different achievements during a live-streamed ceremony. Then give them shout outs on their own page in the hub afterwards. It’s a way to include your audience and make them feel extra special.

The hub is flexible enough to accommodate a mix of media, and you can link out to other sites if needed. This means you can choose whatever methods are best suited to telling your story.

Over to you

While Vito is a perfect platform for running online events, that’s not all you can use it for. I hope this post has given you a few fun ideas for celebrating a remote Christmas. If you’re interested in becoming one of Vito’s pre-launch customers, fill in this short form and we’ll be in touch. Have a different creative idea for how to use Vito to celebrate a remote Christmas? Let us know on Twitter!