Flow helps Gender Links celebrate its 20th anniversary

Few things deliver a more special feeling than seeing people you have connected have a good time.

So it was truly heartwarming to witness the joy emanating from the Gender Links representatives who checked in from 15 sub-Saharan countries on 17 March 2021 to take part in the NGO’s 20^th birthday, hosted on our bespoke, interactive online events platform. The birthday event followed an awards event, which was also hosted on the platform.

Gender Links asked Flow Communications to create an event platform on its website landing page, plus an integrated fundraising platform that tallied donations from each country across various payment platforms and methods, such as PayFast, pledges and cash donations. We used our bespoke eventing app to do this.

The app’s features include the ability to present live commentary from experts; a repository of supplementary information; and a curated wall, offering the best of social media commentary and interactive polls, and we adapted it to Gender Links’ specific requirements – as we do for any client that opts to use it. In Gender Links’ case this meant adding a mechanism through which attendees could donate – a “donate button” on the website.

The app was initially built for the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, and was also used by Gender Links on 8 March 2021 for an awards ceremony. Other clients that have used it include the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, which deployed it for the 10th Annual Desmond Tutu International Peace Lecture, and the German Agency for International Cooperation and the European Union for their Team Europe Climate Diplomacy Week.

Flow provided Gender Links with live media coverage of the birthday event, which included an awards ceremony, and the separate 8 March awards ceremony.

More than 90 tweets were posted during the 17 March birthday event, and pre-event tweets were posted in the run-up to the celebration, to drum up interest and enthusiasm. On the day, tweets about the event earned more than 20 900 impressions (the number of times the tweets were seen in accounts across).

Flow also provided three Facebook posts that garnered a reach of 1 032, 74 engagements and 37 likes, and an Instagram post that earned 12 likes.

Birthday celebrations are always happy events, and we at Flow thoroughly enjoyed being caught up in Gender Links’ enthusiasm. While it is gratifying to have received personal thanks from Gender Links founder Colleen Lowe Morna for how we handled the event, simply being able to connect so many people across so many miles and in the middle of a pandemic was reward enough for us.