Watch Party Toolkit - CCL Community

Tired of attending virtual conferences alone, host a watch party with your chapter to view and celebrate CCL’s Fall Virtual Conference - Grassroots Rising: Leveling Up in the Climate Fight. Follow the steps below to plan your group’s event for November 4th.

Have you completed this training?

Usage Instructions

This watch party toolkit provides tips and resources for chapters that want to organize an in-person gathering to watch a CCL online conference.

How to Throw a Watch Party

Leverage your local connections, assign tech support roles, practice with the team, coordinate food, and plan for back-up. If you're feeling bold, invite a member of the local press and other organizations to join your event!

Find a venue and screening

A watch party may be held in any private home or public venue. All you need is an area that will hold your expected attendees and a way to connect a laptop to a larger screen.
Look for a physical venue that provides some of the needed audio/visual equipment. For example, churches or libraries may have a room with a video projector, TV or large screen that can be used at no or low cost. Tap into the possibilities through your chapter membership.
A couple of weeks prior to your watch party, test your technology (including sound) and room set-up with your tech team.

Invite guests

Make sure all the members of your chapter know about the watch party and ask them to commit to personally invite a few friends, neighbors or family members they think might be interested. Be sure to invite volunteers who are engaged and active, but don’t attend chapter meetings and people who were active in your chapter before the pandemic.
Consider forming a calling team to phone people individually to personally invite them. This is one way to get a lot of attendance.
Send email invitations early — at least three weeks before the watch party. And send reminders closer to the date.
Create a Facebook event or use an online invitation service like Evite or EventBrite.
Include details about when the party will start, details on the food and drinks being provided, what time the viewing will begin, and when you expect to wrap things up.
Get creative in how allies and other local organizations can help out or join in.

Here’s an example invitation:

Food, drinks, and Van Jones! My local Citizens’ Climate Lobby chapter is hosting a watch party for our Fall Conference: Grassroots Rising: Leveling up in the Climate Fight and we’d like you to join us. CCL has crafted this virtual conference with top notch speakers (including CNN commentator, social entrepreneur, and renowned author Van Jones) and dynamic sessions to help us learn how to advocate for climate policy. Details: November 4th at 1 pm ET / 10 am PT. Feel free to bring a friend or two.

Schedule some social time

When you gather is up to you. One possibility would be to begin an hour before the conference starts and socialize with snacks and drinks. Then end your event by offering your attendees the chance to get more involved by taking one of a few simple actions.

Whenever you choose to start, make it a priority for your attendees to feel welcome (name tags are a great help) and encourage newcomers to sign in with their names and email addresses. This is a great opportunity for recruitment.

Watch the pre conference Info Session

CCL is offering its biggest ever Informational Session during the hour before the Nov 4th Fall Virtual Conference kickoff. 9am PT / 12pm ET.

Please invite new recruits, and veteran volunteers too!

Here's an example invitation:

Dear [chapter name] volunteers,

CCL is offering a special CCL Informational Session for new and veteran volunteers who want to expand their brains on CCL's methods and approaches. Tune in an hour before the Fall Virtual Conference kickoff — on Nov. 4th at 12 p.m. ET/9 a.m. PT. Registration is free!

Include an action

Before the conference program begins, ask attendees "who is familiar with CCL?" as a perfect entry point to include a brief pitch about CCL’s work locally and nationally.

Consider asking people at your event to take an online action on your path to going paperless. See CCL Community's Paperless Grassroots Outreach training for recommendations on how to get started and the actions to feature. For example, ask your congressperson to champion more climate legislation at cclusa.org/action
Ask newcomers to Join CCL at cclusa.org/join. Expand your chapter’s capacity for our important work ahead!
Invite attendees to make a donation or to become monthly donors. Support our work through a tax-deductible donation to the nonprofit Citizens’ Climate Education.

Share your Success!

Log your event and include attendees in the Action Tracker, under 'Grassroots Outreach.'
Designate someone to post photos from your watch party to your social media accounts and share those photos with marketing@citizensclimate.org

Consider finding ways to fundraise

If your chapter is interested, find ways to feature the opportunity for local sponsors to be acknowledged:

Don’t be afraid to ask for sponsorships in exchange for recognition in your event advertising, outreach, or on screen before the conference starts.
One great way to get the word out is with community partners. These nonprofits, local organizations and businesses agree to promote your event to their membership or customers (via emails, their own social media, social networks, etc.)
In return, recognize your sponsors as community partners on the event publicity material, website, at the beginning of the event, and on screen.
If you collect in-kind donations such as gift certificates, consider using them as a raffle prize that gives the audience the chance to fill out their name and contact information.
Consider setting up a local bank account for your chapter so that you can benefit from the money you raise. Many sponsors do not require additional tax ID information to donate and for those that do, you can send their donations to CCL HQ for national fundraising.