An Interactive Holiday Party for a Community-Centered Nonprofit

Priority: Hosting an Engaging and Interactive Online Holiday Party

Ever Forward hosted a festive online event complete with a stage, dancing, and rooftop chats in Kumospace.

Ashanti Branch is the Executive Director of Ever Forward, a nonprofit that's dedicated to helping underserved boys achieve academic and personal success. He was seeking out useful resources for Ever Forward when he attended an event at Stanford University dedicated to new online tools, and was thrilled to discover Kumospace, an immersive virtual chat platform. 

"They showed it to me, and I was like, 'Oh this is it," Ashanti says. He knew immediately that he wanted to use Kumospace to host Ever Forward's virtual holiday party because he found the platform to be more interactive and engaging than other alternatives. 

"On Zoom everyone's talking, or someone has to sit and listen to other people talking," Ashanti says. "It's hard to have a five-person conversation unless you put people in breakout rooms." 

With Kumospace he liked that there was no need to set up different breakout rooms to have more intimate conversations. 

Kumospace stands out from other online platforms because of it's vivid real-life settings, and its core feature —spatial audio. Spatial audio allows users to talk only to the people close to them, allowing guests to dip in and out of conversations with ease and have spontaneous discussions. 

Making the Virtual Space Festive and Fun

The Ever Forward team designed the event to host up to 100 people, with four different floors. 

"It was amazing," Ashanti says. "There was a holiday floor, and a stage. We had people on stage doing talks, we had people on the rooftop bar just hanging out. We had a floor where our students could go and learn from other young people what our program does, and we also had a welcome floor."

Kumospace has dozens of different pre-designed templates, including a Holiday and NYE Party space to choose from.

One standout feature was the ability to Screenshare to everyone in the space, which allowed Ashanti to share information about Ever Forward's happenings and successes. 

Ever Forward plans to host their 2021 holiday party in Kumospace, which has features like the option to add custom furniture and images, and the ability to showcase your video to the entire space and multiple floors via Broadcast. There's also functions like adding your own YouTube videos and custom links throughout the space. 

Ashanti says he thinks people especially enjoyed being able to go to a space and dance or go to a different area of the floor, and hangout during the two-hour holiday party. He was happy to see young people at the party get a kick out of the space and relax. 

"People were just so amazed they were meeting new people," he says. "It was a whole lot of fun."