Project background
The Gaming Community Expo (GCX) brings gamers, developers, influencers, and artists together to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital however due to the COVID-19 crisis, the in-person conference was cancelled. This left vendors and artists planning to attend the event at a loss of potential customers, accumulated fees from tickets and travel cancellations, and had increased unsold inventory products meant for the event.
I proposed to bring the artist alley into an online only format and with a team we would incorporate a live stream charity marathon along with a landing page to drive potential customers to visit different artists' storefronts.
The Challenge
An online/virtual artist alley was rare but to have a live stream of the artists was not heard of on any level. With less than 3 months we needed to develop a responsive website structure that would later be incorporated into to the GCX.com site along with building out a charity marathon stream structure of artists/vendors.
The Goals
The alley had two purposes: (1) provide an outlet for artists to market their websites/online stores to sell inventory and bring awareness to users of different artists to shop all in one place, along with (2) raising money for the St. Jude Foundation.
My Role
With a team of five artists, my role was to coordinate team members, gather and synthesize user feedback, provide guidance on mock-up prototypes of workflows and the architecture for the landing page and live stream, along with facilitating the live stream’s structure and schedule to all participants.
To solve these major pain-points, I proposed to bring the artist alley into an online only format, which would incorporate a live stream marathon along with a landing page to drive potential customers to visit different artist storefronts. The goal of the online artist alley was to provide an outlet for artists to market themselves, sell their inventory, and raise money for St. Jude.
Our team worked with the Pixels After Dark crew to market the Artist Alley. I was a featured guest on the podcast tasked with promoting and informing the public on key details about the stream schedules and why an artist alley is so important at each convention.
The Artist Alley
Coordinating with the official GCX coordinators, a new site was developed based on original mock-ups and data that was provided by the website. Over 30 artists joined the artist alley.
The Results and Outcomes
Collectively 16 artists streamed for 32 hours and raised over $4500 in donations in 2-Days when the original goal was $2000.
