Captioning Service For Non-profit Organisation

Founded in 1906, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) is a non-profit organization that has brought all the museums- art museums, science centers, arboretums, zoos, history museums, etc., together. AAM is providing them strong support in developing their standards, improving their excellence, helping them adopt best practices, sharing knowledge, and advocating on issues of concern to the museum community. AAM helps museums meet the needs of their diverse public. They also offer numerous opportunities to museum staff and volunteers. Over 25000 individual museum professionals, 4000 institutions, and 150 corporate members benefit from the support of the Alliance. AAM ensures that museums remain a vital part of the American landscape.

Clara Allen, the meetings and event manager at AAM, got in touch with our executives and enquired about live captioning their events. It was a four-day event for AAM, and it was for the ‘AAM Annual Meeting & Museum Expo’ that happened in May and June. It was a huge event, and we had to remain very focused on their event schedules. We received all the event dates with time. They were back-to-back sessions which means we had to assign different English captioners for each session. There were also a lot of technical issues that we had to handle. 

The sales team had to prepare a quotation, keeping in mind all the constraints. The duration of each session was different. It amounted to a total of 61 hours of real time captioning. So a detailed quotation was sent to Tiffany, a representative of AAM. Since AAM is a non-profit organization and the project’s volume was huge, we decided to offer them a reasonable concession. Finally, the proposal was sent, and everything was approved. We were all set to start the work for their annual meeting. 

In the beginning, we were requested for a demo to live caption for a few minutes. We had to secure captioners beforehand. After arranging captioners, we suggested them a date for the demo. Our live captioners captioned on the Big Maker platform using StreamText, where a unique URL was provided to view the captions. There was a discussion post demo, and we were asked more about our services. Upon knowing our services, they were interested in receiving captions for their post-event meeting, after which they could upload them to various other video platforms. 

It was a huge event, and we provided them vast resources. Around 15 well-experienced captioners with technical expertise were allocated for live captioning as all AAMs virtual providers are eShow and use the Big Marker platform for all their webinars. Also, for the other networking events, they wanted to use Zoom. If you have long concurrent sessions like this and find it hard to hunt for experienced live captioners, you can contact us any time and we would organize certified human captioners to work on any number of sessions.  

The big day began, and we had all our captioners ready for live captioning. We had six concurrent sessions for the first two days, followed by 7 and 6 for the other two days. At this point, a few more sessions were added, and now it was around 61 hours of live captioning. The event was successful, and we were able to deliver accurate captions throughout the sessions. The transcripts were downloaded from StreamText in a word file and were reserved for post-event captioning. 

In the next 48 hours, all the videos were rechecked, and the existing transcripts were rereviewed for 99% accuracy. These accurate transcripts were time-coded to embed on the videos. Captions were then enabled. Audiences worldwide would be able to access the content with these captions. The videos with captions were uploaded to dropbox from where they could easily download their files.

Clara expressed her gratitude for the efforts we put in. This event was challenging as it had back-to-back sessions, and all the sessions needed to be coordinated according to schedule captioners and technical support throughout. This event has given us a moment of pride and a lot to learn.