 Hello and welcome to the live stream. This is a weekly show where I interview fellow live streamers to understand how they're using live streaming as a tool in their business and to discover how they use the tech, the gear and the software to produce great live shows. We also like to focus in on one specific area of expertise that they have that they can share with the rest of us and today is no exception. My guest today is Keely Dunn. Keely is a multi-proneur who heads up Discord for creators dedicated to helping content creators build engaged and valuable communities on Discord and of course FH umpires as well through which she educates field hockey umpires, players and coaches and fans worldwide and supports umpires to perform their best. She's also a public speaker, a trained lawyer and a civil litigator not to mention an all-round fantastic person. There are so many great conversations to be had with Keely building a community around something you're passionate about for starters as she did with FH umpires then serving your community through live streaming and of course building a community around your content as a creator and we'll certainly get into all of that. Discord though is something that I think is often misunderstood by the mainstream and I know I certainly misunderstood it. I used to think that Discord was something just for gamers and gaming communities but I was wrong and hashtag Keely was right as is so often the case. In fact creating my Discord community for Take One Tech was the best decision I've made as a content creator and it's all thanks to Keely. Here's the thing though, anyone can set up a Discord community but for it to be successful it needs to be set up in the right way and then nurtured. Server architecture is something that Keely is an expert in and the experience and understanding she has for nurturing a community really shows in the work that she has done not just for her own FH umpires and Discord for creators communities but also for her work for clients such as Ecamm Live and Dot Rock to name just a couple where she has taken what were dormant, unloved and unused servers and has truly brought them to life hives of activity conversation and engagement. Keely is also technically the server manager for my Take One Tech community but really that title does her a great disservice because she is the inspiration, the architect and the ongoing consultant who helps keep me on track as I build it out. So building a community as a content creator is such a rewarding and vital part of the process and I feel that Discord is the perfect place to do that and it's certainly something that you should be considering and so if you're interested I think you can see why there's really no better person to be having this conversation with than Keely. So without further ado let's welcome Keely Dunn. Hey Keely how are you doing today? I am I am so excited after that intro I'm like who is this person? She sounds really interesting. She's kind of a big deal. What a nice intro though and I this is really fun because for those of you who maybe don't know Alec as well as many of us do Alec and I think we're really good friends now. I'm just going to throw it out there we're friends it's been such a joy getting to know you over the last several months and creating alongside you and I'm really happy to have this opportunity to talk on your podcast this is going to be really great. It certainly is it's talking to a great friend so I thought it would be great though to start with just kind of your I mean just the whole story of how you got into live streaming and creating your community for FH umpires you know how did that come about maybe you can just share a little bit about your your sort of background story in terms of that. Sure absolutely my the way I got into live streaming and content creation for FH umpires is a story that probably will resonate with a lot of people because I've been passionate about umpiring education for a very long time I was an international umpire for 16 years I started back in 2000 and to a little while ago and I couldn't find a way to do something with it I had built up a brand on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all those places sharing information and being a cheerleader and all that sort of thing but I didn't know how could I make this an ongoing concern and the word monetize it feels kind of ugly but really it's a way that you can say I get to create for my community and I get to sustain myself at the same time I've just decided that's that's what monetization really means and I couldn't figure out how to do that and then of course the pandemic hit and everybody started getting into memberships and offering memberships to their communities and I was like yeah that's the ticket and of course you know it was brilliant timing the entire sport shut down for for two years and nobody was playing nobody was umpiring it was just deadsville but people were at home and they were missing their people and that's when I realized you know what I should just go on I've seen this this live streaming stuff it can't be that hard I'll just go on YouTube and I'll just I don't know talk to three people to be fine put zero pressure on myself and it just sort of snowballed from there I didn't even know there were communities around live streaming I didn't know that people were uh that offered training in this I didn't know there were different software packages I kind of found the first one that sounded good ecamp that sounds fine boom slapped it on my computer and started going and then here we are in 2020 whatever two COVID my brain for time is just gone but that's basically how I got into live streaming and it that was the piece of the puzzle that brought me into greater touch with the people that I wanted to serve and they told me what they wanted I asked them questions they asked me questions and then through that live streaming interaction engagement that's when I figured out a business model and that's when we got to move forward well first of all you really looked out finding ecamp as your first stop because I know a lot of us went through a whole load of other headaches to get to that point so that was a smart move from the outset yeah but I made up for it by starting out with a blue yeti microphone a Logitech Brio webcam for a very long time and I used my AirPods as my microphone and my headset for for quite some time and my background was a white shower curtain that I hung up behind me because I thought oh I should really just take away all the all the busyness and and just make it really clean and oh my god it looked savagely terrible if you like having a good laugh please go to the earliest days of the FH umpires live videos on youtube and just just sit down with a nice glass of wine and have yourself a good chuckle because they are really really bad but I didn't even know and I didn't actually even care I just wanted to try it I wanted to see what happened and I knew that through the process of experimentation of just doing and then learning by doing I was going to improve and lo and behold it did yeah at the end of the day it's all down to the the sort of value that you're giving to the people who are who are there and wanting to to get the information that you've got to give them and so what are the sort of the the live streams that you do what how what sort of form do they take and how regularly do you do those well I go live every week now on Wednesdays that stayed consistent so during the pandemic the really hard days of the pandemic I was going live almost I would ordinarily go live twice a week I had my what-up Wednesday show and then umpire at home where I would ump I would interview a prominent umpire in the world you know somebody who'd gone to the olympics world cups that sort of thing and talked to them about their experiences occasionally I got really cool people like top commentators I got the I got an olympic gold medalist captain in Tom Abreel from Belgium on the show one time top coaches like Adam commons and we would just talk about the sport in and umpiring in in a new way and then I would do a couple produced videos a week so my production schedule back in 2020 slash and half of 2021 was nuts it was just flat out because I didn't know any different and I thought well this is a good way to grow and I actually I remember a few of uh people in the fall of 2020 they'd start messaging me and say keely god love your stuff but um oh I can't keep up so could you just could you just like slow your roll a little bit and maybe not go live so often because I want to be there and want to support and I was like oh okay so I started to fine tune that and now I'm in a period especially now with discord for creators that I've I have keyed it back to just the one live stream a week on the Wednesdays which is just a really fun ritual uh I love knowing that when I go there I'm gonna have my core people there some people are gonna float in and the replays are just doing really well as well and for me it was a lesson in okay try a bunch of things see how often you should go and how much content you should produce and then your people will tell you what they want what they find most valuable so what up Wednesdays is it basically a Q&A but I've gathered the questions throughout the week because what happens for me because I've been around so long I'm sold people know that they can send me questions on Twitter WhatsApp Facebook Instagram all the places they'll tag me and stuff and say keely what about this call is it correct or not and I would I would often back in the day I would uh write an answer back to them and it would be very well researched and I check some clips and I go back to the rule book and I make it a very organized response and I thought wait a minute I'm I'm literally sharing what I've learned and and what I've analyzed here and what my conclusions are to one person this is dumb I am absolutely spreading myself too thin what if I took all these questions and just spat them out on a Wednesday and and used ecam in order to produce this really cool visual uh aspect as well where I can share what's happening in the clip and I can slow mo and I can zoom in and I can do all these things and I can put little circles on there and I can interact with people as I'm talking about the issues so that's what what up Wednesday has really evolved into is often looking at clips that are online that people have tagged me in or addressing questions that have come in to my discord server now that could use a lot more um a more thorough discussion more in depth it would be really valuable valuable to put out to the public so sorry that was a very long answer to what should have been a tiny question which is what is what am I doing live streaming that's basically where that is all going down into now well that that all leads nicely though into the whole aspect of discord and so when did you sort of introduce discord into uh into what you were doing and and starting to build out that that community it was about uh what are we now we're at september so it was about 16 months ago and it was actually a very senior member in my community uh whose name is neils and he's a really fantastic person he was on my live stream and he uh and he is one of my moderators in youtube and in my server and and he said you know keely if you're struggling with your your uh membership group and presenting information he didn't say all these words i'm filling in form but if if your facebook group sucks i got an answer for you you should get a discord and i said yeah i should get a what and he then called me on whatsapp which was the time that i found out he was a 15 year old from the netherlands and and here he was telling me about this discord server thing and so of course i googled it and i had a look and i went whoa oh no no no no no no this is not gonna do this is for gamers this is confusing it's cluttered it's dark it's it's scary looking and i'm a professional and i have a business on facebook so i told him no i said no this this i'm not doing this and then two weeks later he was like hey keely you should get a discord and i was like neils no i'm not going to do this two weeks after that he said keely and this is around the time that i realized he was neurodivergent so he wasn't going to take no for an answer thankfully and he said keely i will make you a server and i'll bring you in and by then he had a couple other cheerleaders on with him from the community another 18 year old who ended up being one of my developers and and they said hey we'll bring you in we'll show you around we'll we'll you know we'll click some buttons with us it'll be totally fine and of course i think they realized that i was a nerd i am a nerd and that as soon as they sort of showed me the ins and outs i'd be like huh so can i do this what happens when i click that can we change this to this thing and what and my curiosity absolutely took over and i thought you know what let's just give it a try it's not like i'm gonna lose anything out in my facebook group because it did suck it was dormant it was dead i was just so frustrated because i people were paying me money to do nothing and i thought no no i don't like this i'm not comfortable with it i wanted to give them the experience that they were paying for i wanted to be able to engage with them and learn from them and find out how i could do better so after we after i looked around and i started getting curious i said okay how about let's invite the other moderators in the other youtube moderators and sort of the the other senior members in my community some of whom are actually senior members so one of the one of my top moderators i call him my my left arm and and four down which is an inside joke about a crossword puzzle answer that he was on a christmas show last year um he's he's not a young man he's a fantastic person but he's not a young man i brought him in i brought in a bunch of people from you know a wide variety of backgrounds and maybe technical proficiencies and that sort of thing and they were like yeah this is actually fun you're right there and we're talking and then we can go into these voice channels spontaneously this yeah this is fun and it took maybe two months before i said yep all in everybody get your butts over to discord shutting down this facebook group i wasn't quite that cavalier about it i like to pretend i was but it took about three months before i i actually said okay we're done with facebook entirely and now it's just sitting there just denseville over there and now the ph empire's server is a hub of activity i have 670 something members in there but it's not about the numbers it's about the quality of the engagement and how people are getting to know each other and how they are providing that support that i so desperately want them to have i'm like outsourcing the best parts in some ways of what i feel community should be and what i want my umpire community to be and it's it's just amazing and i'm completely in love it's pathetic i don't care i'm just saying it right now i love discord and i love my discord server well you know that i've been on a very similar journey because i had the exact same reaction when i came in up to it was like well i'm not so sure about this and i think part of the problem with with discord is if people have had any experience before in other people's servers other creator servers or gamer servers or whatever it happens to be i'm involved in sort of trading circles as well so they have certain trading servers as well but to be honest they the server is basically it's it is what the person the architect makes it to be and so you can go into something that is very off-putting if they haven't done you know a good job of actually setting it up and that is what gives people the bad experience with facebook groups they're all pretty much the same and there's a whole load of downsides that we can come on to um but basically you go in you know what you're going to get with a facebook group basically just a stream of posts with no organization or anything like that and at least it is consistent from that point of view but in discord it is very much a case of how somebody you know architects it from the from the outset and so i had exactly the same feeling of you know it's not for me and and then it was only through seeing what you'd done you know specifically with doc server and then you know took a few tentative steps of setting my own up and with your help and advice sort of building that out that i i saw the light as well so yeah perhaps we could then talk about you know what is it then that makes discord as an option for your community just so much better than like a facebook group the default position by people i think is well everyone's on facebook so that seems to be the logical place to to build out our community why is that not necessarily a great idea in your your opinion for me i think we get a little confused about where our communities members are and where we can best serve them and facebook to me especially now that they've destroyed the algorithm and everything's about recommendation media now instead of social media which was i want to see everything from my friends and i don't care about anything else facebook has been eroding that and then in the last few months along with instagram because they're the same thing have just chucked that out the window and they're like you know what we're going to show you what we think you want to see we don't care about your friends you know and i'm like i want to see my drunk uncles angry political posts what are you talking about and in that context sure that's where your people are and they feel comfortable there and they can find you there but in order to engage with them on a deeper level and be able to get to know them and them to get to know you and deepen that trust if you are serious about building an offering with your community that revolves around that kind of trust you got to get them off facebook you got to get them off wherever it is that you've been discovered by them and bring them into a place where you can you can couch to your entire experience with them in the same place so that is one of the big things there's no distractions about advertisements or your drunk uncles angry political posts or cat memes and things like well there's a lot of cat memes on discord i shouldn't that was oh boy that you need to cut that because that's so inaccurate you can have as many crazy gifts as you want but there's just something about the way that things flow if you look at a discord server it's it's very hierarchical and from a western point of view to start at the left and everything filters down through the right as you're looking through a discord screen it actually ends up being very intuitive that the biggest categories over there boom boom boom it's a it's a website you know ui standard that we're very accustomed to and you as soon as you get over that initial visual obstacle of how how it looks at first then you're like oh this this is a breeze this just really makes sense so that's probably the first reason is that it allows you a place where you can get to know your people better there's also just the the ability to organize the conversations so much more effectively and sometimes again this depends like you pointed out on the server owner managers and the architecture things can be chaotic people can throw things in all kinds of places but as i've joked around with my people on a regular basis i'm like you guys were the best discord server people because they're a bunch of umpires they want rules and they want them followed like i i will wake up in the morning at you know 7 30 and a lot of my members are either uk or european and when i wake up they've already been up for seven hours and it's just like there's all these new posts and i will hit the top of the unread posts in a in a particular channel and i'll be like whoa that's not it that's against the oh somebody corrected them right away they're just on top of it because that's who they are and they also really respect i think what we're trying to do as a community so having strong moderators and just people who are really invested in the success of that environment they want it to go well so they're trying to make sure the content's in the right channels and things like that i actually have to keep encouraging people um every every server should have an off topic channel right every server needs a squirrel channel where people can just blow off whatever meme steam they have just go crazy over there and i have to remind my people actually you guys are talking about umpiring that's not off topic go into the general like i have to encourage them it's like no it's okay they're just they're like well it's not really specific or it's only about our region it's fine get it into the general we're good we're good so that that organization and the ability to find what you're looking for is very effective filtering notifications and being able to change what your attention is drawn to based on your interests massive search ability oh my god search ability to be able to go through and say huh i want to find every post that somebody has mentioned penalty corners in in the last six months you can do that search on discord in a server and you will get everything you need you can also confine that to a certain channel you can confine that to a certain user you could confine that to posts that have media attached to them and are also talking about penalty corners because somebody attached this really cool video about a penalty corner and you can't remember like who was it when was it bank you can do those kind of searches and it's just such a different experience from facebook people don't even know that they can search in discord they're like what search bar yeah and that just enriches the experience for every single member so and yeah so many things it's the results you get back from that search that is such it's night and day compared to anyone who's tried to search a facebook group then yes i mean even searching for my own post that i've posted something in a facebook group trying to find that post again is just impossible it's like once you've once it's gone it's it's just disappeared into the the facebook black hole to be never found again and yeah to be to be processed and sold back to you somehow in an advertisement i don't know yeah but that thing you mean you've said it already but the the thing about the organization is just that is the the this all secret source really i think that people can choose what they're interested in you know like on your server you've got lots of different topics related to different aspects that people may have an interest in in my server it's the same there's different different topics that people may want to talk about or different tech gear and things like that that they may have an interest in but they might not want to hear about all of the other stuff that i'm talking about about kajabi or stream deck or whatever it happens to be so the fact that they can sort of filter it all down and just get the conversations that are relevant to them and also dive back in at any point and follow along with the conversations that have happened since they were last in there whereas with facebook you're just getting this stream of somebody's else's consciousness you know and it's uh yeah very little control over it so yeah it's uh it is it is night and day the other thing though about it that i particularly like perhaps you can talk a little bit about the the roles that you can assign to people so that rather than just being a community and it's on i don't want to keep going on about facebook but it is the obvious comparison um you know you've got a facebook group that people can come into um but then the ability to sort of uh give people different levels of access in discord i think is as well as another sort of powerful feature so perhaps you can explain how that works and some of the things that you can do with that sure some servers might use roles which is essentially just a fancy way of tagging each member with a you know a particular kind of permission they might use roles just as sort of a you know honorarium sort of honorary title but you can use roles in order to allow people to choose what they're interested in and to be able to see only what they're interested in instead of being perhaps a little bit we don't like the old word but they can get a little too much of other things that they're not interested i tend to turn off uh for example if somebody is like hey here's a section about pets do you want to see and i'm like pets are cute but i kind of don't have time i'm here to learn so i will turn those sort of things off or if it's about podcasting uh until very recently i haven't been interested in podcasting so i tend to turn that kind of content off so you can use that as a way to filter your experience or your member's experiences in terms of their attention and their time you can also use them in order to provide exclusive access to members of the server that people can pay for in order to get more value out of you so in my fh umpire server i have levels of membership to which members get to access different sections and different activities that i hold in those sections so my yellow members are my my prime mentoring group they're the people i invest a lot of time in and i absolutely love them all and we have a uh a huddle every monday we get together it's 12 for me and it's a variety of times for them and we sit in a voice channel and we talk about our weekend and our prior week of umpiring and i let everybody you know go through their experiences maybe ask questions that happen to them and that sits within the category that only yellow members get access to so you can then provide those special experiences you can monetize your membership by giving them access to you to special things that you want to teach them different experiences and that is one of the really really powerful ways you can do it and you can just set it up in all kinds of different ways roles aren't exclusionary there you can have a whole bunch of roles for the same people if you want it's it's just the the sky's the limit when it comes to that sort of thing and you talk about memberships there there's the thing i like about that specifically as well is there's a number of different ways you can do it so i've got like a buy me a coffee membership but also a youtube channel membership and then there's memberships available in discord as well so it's nice to have those different ways that you can you know if you've got an existing membership program for example on on youtube then you can easily kind of link that into discord and it just automates all of the roles and things like that for you so i thought that was a great sort of feature but there's a lot of sorry there's a lot of really exciting things coming on the pipe as well so there's some products that are coming out now um leap past i think i hope i said that right because i just found them yesterday and i think i've already forgotten their name lays on top of discord and allows you to process memberships through them to a discord server or even to slack they can they can memorize slack as well and there's a product coming out that i am i'm gonna film a video and i'm gonna send it back to the person who accepted my application for the beta program to say i don't think you understand how much i want to be involved in this project it's called nas.io so it's nasdaily uh who is a very famous youtuber that i don't know anything about but the product that he is making lays over top of all kinds of different communities and adds courses and adds content libraries and adds all the things that i've been trying to offer in one place that i haven't been able to that includes discord all in one spot and i'm like yes this is a really exciting time to be involved in discord because the the general public and not just content creators but all kinds of business people are starting to find out about this platform that is so versatile has pretty significant user base already even though you might say but i'm not a gamer keely well yeah but there's lots of people who are gamers and then kind of go on to do other things in their lives like start businesses or become your customers so you know it's the fact that people play games and they go into servers in order to talk about those games and share those experiences doesn't mean that they can't be people who are going to be fantastic members of your communities as well so this is there's a really really cool stuff coming up i just want to take a moment to talk about ecamm live this is the live production mac software that we're using to live stream and record this podcast in my opinion it is the best live streaming and recording software on the market today so what exactly does it do well essentially it allows you to control the content that you're including in your video be it a live stream or a recorded video and you do this by building out different scenes that contain the content that you want to show this content may be a feed from your camera or indeed multiple cameras or you may be sharing a screen which is what i do a lot of in my tutorial style videos that i make for my take one tech youtube channel you can share the screen from a second computer or maybe even a gaming console if you are a live streaming gamer and just as we are doing in this podcast you can also bring in guests using ecamm lives built in interview mode where guests can join from a browser and you can then incorporate their video and audio into your production finally you can add all kinds of additional graphical and animated overlay elements and even movies to really add a level of branded professionalism that would be hard to achieve in any other way the real magic happens though when you hit that record or go live button because then you are able to seamlessly switch back and forth between all of the scenes that you've created and indeed this is how all of the videos have been created for my take one tech youtube channel and the reason it's called take one tech by the way is because all of the videos are made in one take with no edits i just hit record make the video and as soon as i hit the end recording button the file is there and ready to be uploaded straight to youtube what i love about ecamm is not just the ease of use that it has when compared to other live streaming software but also the greater flexibility it gives in terms of layouts and designs that you can create for your shows when compared to some of the hardware streaming solutions and one thing that makes ecamm great specifically for podcasts is the fact that it has the ability to record isolated audio tracks so once we finish recording this podcast i'll have a separate audio file for me my guests and any other audio tracks that have been a part of the recording that makes the editing and repurposing of the content for the podcast so much more streamlined it does have another little trick up its sleeve though and that is its virtual camera feature this allows you to take the video output from ecamm live straight into communication apps like zoom microsoft teams discord and so on this means that rather than just appearing in zoom meetings with a regular camera feed you can now show up with all of the amazing production values that ecamm live gives you and deliver that straight into your zoom meeting and trust me when you rock up to a zoom meeting with ecamm the other participants will be truly amazed so whether for live streaming recorded video content or to level up your zoom game i highly recommend you give ecamm live ago you can get a free trial by going to take one tech dot i o slash ecamm that's e c a double m take one tech dot i o slash ecamm and of course you can find a link to that in the show notes as well you will certainly not regret giving it a go now let's get back to the show you mentioned as well about like funneling people into the community and all of these other places being that and that's something that kind of links back to the memberships is once you've got people that you know you're building your community in discord and everything's in that that one place you can feed people into your memberships from there and they're already then in that that place and i know that when i when i set up my server a few months ago that really sort of shifted my whole focus whereas before my my sort of main hub if you like as a content creator was my youtube channel and i always felt that that was kind of the number one place and i was trying to you know use twitter and tiktok and all these are the different platforms to varying degrees of success but having those all filtering back in towards the the youtube channel it just completely shifted my my focus when i set up the discord server and that's why i say it's you know the greatest decision that i've made since i've been becoming a content creator so um yeah it's just such a such a powerful hub for for for all of that and yeah it's been fun sorry i keep kidding you off because i'm like oh oh but it's been really fun watching that happen for you and that there are people who come into the server and then they're like wow alex is so he's so attentive he's engaging he he answers these you know with these big long paragraphs and he's he's giving me all this information bang i need to be a member i need to support this guy and i want more of this so you're you're not only using it as a as sort of a destination for your community but there's also that extra layer of you know hey come in we're gonna have a serious date here but now we're gonna go steady because you've seen just how great it is to go out on the day with me so i i've loved watching that in your server it's been really fun well it's i mean it is such a different level of engagement so with creating videos on youtube is is one thing and you get comments but as soon as a comment comes in you see it and you answer it but there's no real thread of a conversation that you can easily follow in in youtube from that perspective also it's a very you know very narrow conversation where there's only two of you involved in the process not many other people are sort of chiming in so there's no real conversation going on there and then i think when people discover live streaming or start live streaming however daunting it may be to begin with that then gives you that extra level of connection where you can feel like you're actually you know doing it live there are people there that are able to respond and you've got that connection but even then there's this the the you know the 10 second lag however short that actually is it really just doesn't become a conversation it's still very one-sided in that respect and so setting up the server and being able to have proper meaningful conversations with people has just been yeah just a real joy to be honest and it feeds all but feeds back into the content because you get in that immediate connection and knowing what people people want to want to get out of it so yeah it's just just on another level really yeah i i look at it like i i've really been thinking about this hard because i'm gonna have to explain it next week at people a video so i better get this right but your your discovery level i'm flipping this whole funnel thing because i hate the idea of funnels i'm looking at it as a pyramid because you're building up to something incredible with you know probably a smaller number of people at the top but your discovery level is yes facebook instagram tiktok twitter and youtube produced videos and a little bit the live streams that's where people find you it's like tinder and they're swiping and they're swiping and they go oh swipe right i like that alec johnson let's let's have another look at this guy and then you use your live streaming is the next layer of that where people get to hang out with you and listen to you for a little while and ask you a few questions and they go yeah i think i like alec he's he's got some good stuff here i wonder if i could spend some more time with him you know i wonder if we could go steady and then your discord server is that next layer of the pyramid that people come in and you know they're bringing their toothbrush because they're spending lots more time with you and they're really you know you're getting to know them and and it's it's a significant relationship and that trust is being built and then from there you can look at your courses your workshops your memberships the whatever the model is for you for me that has been the most effective way to build up especially in a field that i'm in with fh empires which nobody's doing this nobody's doing a membership subscription international umpire education thing i am the only person i don't know why i'm so alone in this marketplace because it's really fun but i am and so in order to convince people or to show them the value hey i'm giving you something you can't get anywhere else this level of knowledge this level of engagement i am obsessed with umpiring let's get together and let's talk a lot and there's a whole bunch of other people just like you waiting for you in my discord server so you're you're building something really really cool everything has its place but for me a discord server is a great place to be right at the top where you're ready to just get super serious about your relationship with your your members one of the other things we we haven't sort of touched on as well is the whole talking about that that connection is the the whole sort of video capability that you've got in in discord as well and it's called voice channels but um yeah the the ability to have something akin to a zoom call for once of a better comparison but that's just to have that all built in that's something that i find really interesting about it and you've got all of the same permissions and things like that as we've got with you know the different topics that you might want to be talking about so maybe you can talk a little bit about how you use how you use those and is that what you do your your i forget the name that you gave to it now where you hang out with your your channel members is that what you do that in as well yes the huddles yes that is that is just one way that i use voice channels and you're absolutely right they are named so stupidly like they i really wish just gord would fix this because it people there are people who have been in servers for six months and have no idea the voice channels exist and they don't realize that this is a way that they can just with one click of a button be inside a essentially a zoom call a you know a facebook a facebook called a messenger call i don't know whatever they call them but there's something very unzoom like about it i don't know why it doesn't feel like you're in a gray corporate box and maybe it's because of the way it treats audio really subtle cues about people actually being able to talk over each other and it's okay instead of it being very no it's your turn now it's your turn which is very feels that's what my experience in zoom is like so it just it feels really natural it can be very spontaneous but i use those voice channels for the regular get-togethers of the huddles i also run what we call our watch parties in there where there might be a live match on and we can all get together in a voice channel and watch it together and i can share my observations on what we're seeing in the match and people can ask me hey keely what do you think why why did the umpire make that call why are they standing over there why are they talking to that player that way and i can engage with people on a real time basis we we would call these development events uh in in real life where you would sit in the stands with your your junior umpires around you and you'd all be gossiping basically about what's happening in the game and and having that learning experience we can do that with matches that are being broadcast from anywhere in the world anytime and it just if it's just an incredibly powerful tool uh another thing that i do is have sometimes very spontaneous somebody will say hey keely i've got some footage from my match yesterday can we have a look at it and i'll pop into a voice channel inside my mentoring category and other people can pop in and they know the rules they know that they're there to to absorb and listen but i'll ask for their insights as well and their opinions and say hey what if you were coaching alex here in this situation what what advice would you give him or what kind of questions would you ask him so i can develop their coaching abilities as well so uh there's just so many great things you can do i do all of my workshops and courses in there as well so we all just get in there and i i do them just like you wouldn't assume but it just doesn't feel quite as crappy somehow and uh it's really really powerful because instead of a zoom call where when you end it all of a sudden there's this really abrupt disconnection with you as as the the leader the creator the the teacher whomever and all the people that you're with you finish up the workshop and you're sitting there and you can ask your follow-up questions you can start you know you can resume that off-topic conversation that you got in trouble with trouble for starting about the cat memes you know in the middle you can go up and you're still in that experience and in that community and that for me is a very very powerful way to be able to deepen that relationship i think you've hit the nail on the head there in terms of what makes it so such a different experience to zoom is you are still in the space it's almost like the the voice channels of kind of like rooms in your your home your community that you've built and the other thing is you can kind of see whether people are in there or not if you've assuming you've got the right sort of commissions for those particular areas whereas with zoom it's there's a whole scheduling thing that needs to happen and then you know until you actually click the join button you know it has is anyone there who is there whereas you can kind of see this all from before i see it very much as like just as i say rooms in a house and you can see all the lights on there's somebody there and you can you can go in and we're a member of different communities where we just do that pop in i mean even on the e-cam server we've got the rec room which is just for that for people to just drop in and uh and commune with each other you want to be exactly yeah and yeah so i think that is the thing it's it hasn't got that formality of um of zoom and yet it can have a really formal and structured approach as well so yeah it's just such a such a different experience and it's the fact that it is it is so integrated so rather than having you know a facebook group a zoom uh meeting and all these different things fragmented it's just the the fact that it sort of encompasses you know everything all in the all in the one place yeah absolutely and you can change up those voice channels by you know by instance so if there's a singular purpose for that channel that you're going to offer a certain workshop and maybe uh certain people you could have a tiered system where people have paid a higher price in order to be able to ask their questions live and then there's other people who are just going to be observers and who are just going to absorb you can using roles you can establish permissions and voice channels that can control that for you so you have a very um a very structured environment if you want that you can have it so that only you are able to speak and everybody else so that you can make sure that you get your your presentation out but you've got a chat going at the same time because uh discord recently introduced text in voice channel chats so there's actually now chat just built right into every single voice channel that you make and and so it's it's what you want to make of it and if you can imagine it you can probably do it in discord and there's something that you're talking about there and if you can imagine that you can do it there's a lot that you can do with bots and i don't want to go too much into uh bots because obviously that is a whole another thing but perhaps you could just touch on because this is something that people hear uh people talking about them or maybe they don't know exactly what they are um you know maybe you can just describe briefly kind of what those are uh what those are for and and and what the sorts of things that they can do yeah it was funny i hadn't realized that there actually is a negative connotation to bots uh until i was talking to jared spank last week about this sort of thing and and he said but bots and discord are good right i'm like oh yeah like they're really good and i hadn't even thought that that could be you know it could be interpreted as a twitter bot or something spammy or something like that but but think of them just as just cute little helper applications that can automate some processes for you whether that's setting up events that people can rsvp to and then they get reminded of according to a schedule that they set that they want to remind her a day before an hour before 15 minutes before and and at the time of the event and that sort of thing bots can also help you with automatically posting certain messages when you want those to show up so it could be that you want to make sure that every week people get a reminder pardon me a reminder that they're going to post their their wins on a monday or or whatever the case might be so you can you know all kinds of helpful things like that what i don't think people should get too wrapped up in is is thinking oh i need a whole bunch of bots for my server right away i want to make sure that that this is automated this is automated this is amazing you know it's actually really cool to strip it down and have nothing except yourself and your interactions with your people for quite some time until you learn what it is that you need in order to enhance the experience for your members so i don't like automated welcome messages i like to send people dms that i've customized and yeah i've got some automatic text and then i spice it up with whatever i know about them or something like that and those little personal touches really mean a lot because of what you're trying to do you're not trying to automate a product here you're trying to foster relationship so don't get too hung up on bots but some of them can really help out and give you some fantastic features in your server and you talked there about you know fostering the the the community and the the relationships with people in there there was a conversation on twitter a few days ago that you were involved in where somebody had the comment about the it seems like they're spending having to spend a lot of time on you know nurturing their their community but that hasn't been my experience and it's not necessarily you know i think some people maybe maybe might be worried that they're going to have to be you know in there all the time and it's going to be a huge task and so what would you say to sort of address that point in terms of when we talk about you know nurturing a community and growing at what sort of interactions are we talking about here and you know frequency and how do you sort of treat that whole thing yeah there's there's some mindset things in there that i that that caused me to pause because i don't remember there ever being a time where i thought this discord server is taking over my life and i can't handle it sometimes things can get busy but when things are that busy people other people are going to pick up the mantle for you and it's just like when you have a popular youtube stream and or even not yet a very big youtube stream but you find your moderators and people who can help guide the conversation and can welcome people and make sure that things stay on topic and add your links and things like that you do that in your server as well so you have people who are helping you my personal you know eagerness just to be able to hang out with the people who are passionate about what i'm passionate about i i'm just like yeah give me more and i've i've actually had to set little boundaries for myself so i tried to only go in you know that first hit in the morning i just have to do it the first thing that i do in the morning is when i when i do end up picking my phone is i look at the discord server and i'm like okay what's happened in the last seven hours that everybody's been awake and i do that first and then i'll have another session around sort of noon one o'clock because that's when those people um are you know getting ready to go to bed and so they're hanging out and they're they're socializing and they're talking about things and then another one later on in the evening when the australians are getting up and so you know i've kind of got little time zone pockets that i really try to focus but engaging with your people can be as simple and quick as popping an emoji reaction onto something funny that they said uh replying with a gift i i gift the crap out of my server everybody knows that if you've said something that keely likes it's going to be a shits creek or a tettle asso gift depends if it's if it's coaching oriented and i'm cheering them on it's going to be tettle asso if it's anything else it's shits creek and they just know that that's what's coming it doesn't take a lot of time yeah but you're showing people that you're paying attention to them you're learning about them and when you have more time you can get into those bigger conversations if that works more for you but for me i think it's one of the more manageable ways to actually get to know your people because it's immediate but it's asynchronous at the same time yeah you know with all those posts and because it's chronological it's easy to get caught up and it's it's easy to feel like okay i i know everything that's happened here i haven't lost track of anything or if there's a channel that's just gone off on some other direction like occasionally my people like to talk about what i call sport ball it's that white ball that half half white half black and it's really popular in england there is no speaking of sport ball in my server except in the off topic section and so if there's been a big conversation about something that's happened i just right click that channel mark is red bang it's gone and i don't have to think about it again so i think once you get the rhythm of your community and who's contributing when and when the hot topics are coming up for for me it's always mondays mondays or big days but after that it's about you being able to set your own boundaries as to what kind of time you're going to invest and having good people to help you and i think you hit the nail on the head there as well again hashtag he was right with the point about you know if you've got a community that's around something that you're passionate about in any case then you know i find it's i don't ever feel like oh it's a it's a it's a chore to go in and and chat with people about the stuff that i love in any case so it's yeah yeah it's yeah it's it's so rewarding and and we and we can see it like we can see it when you're in the server and you've just there's this big long paragraph about how to set up your recaster pro 2 because you love that stuff yeah and it shows and that's where that authenticity is if if serving your community is is hard if it's a labor if it if it feels like it's an imposition in your time then you know i'm not the boss of you but maybe spend a little bit of time thinking okay is this really what i'm passionate about is this really what i want not every content creator needs to have a community not every business model requires community engagement and participation and that sort of thing so that just might not be the right fit for you and that's okay but if you want a community because you're like us and we just love sharing all this stuff and getting it back and learning from each other and growing like that then yeah it's the answer it's the way it certainly is i'm so well i'm so glad that you showed me the way with this respect so yeah i'm forever grateful for that and i'm so glad you listened well we're we're coming up to the top of the hour and i do always like to have a little look behind the scenes and i'm even more excited to go behind the scenes with your live streaming set up because i'll leave you to show everyone the way that you've got things set up but there's something quite unique and special about it i just have to say for anyone that's listening on audio you can find a link in the description to a page that keely's got with all of the stuff that she's going to be talking about and also um and also uh so you'll be able to find a video about it and some images about it and you can also obviously find a link to the youtube video where this will be uh reposted to watch the uh the replay of this but i will spotlight you for a second so that maybe you can oh actually how how about instead of doing that spotlight how about you show off the images for a quick second because for some reason my iphone is turned off so i'm going to get up and i'm going to fix it no problem so i'll let i'll just stick up the the images here and uh as as rich says in the chat in the uh the amazon let's have a little look then rich is something i always seem to be saying um so this is uh this is keely's uh keely's set up and it's it is a work of art i mean i come from an engineering background and uh so i love i love these kind of these kind of things and there is really something quite uh quite spectacular about what keely has created with this sort of all-in-one streaming streaming setup so perhaps and uh there we go perhaps you can tell us about like what what what it is you've created and why you created it and also what is my little my little frankenstein monster uh this is rick my rolling rig and uh i am super proud of this mostly because again i don't think there's many people who have decided to set up their entire video production or live streaming setup on a rolling structure now i live in an apartment that's quite small um well maybe maybe by lots of standards it's not so i shouldn't say that but it i like to have a clean space and i like to be able to do other things in an 820 square foot apartment so my whole camera my monitors my lighting and my uh mac mini which is sort of my assisting computer is all connected to this rig and i actually just filmed a video today of me you know setting it up and i'm going to do a time lapse that's going to be all over my socials in probably about three weeks because that's how long it takes me to edit videos but it shows how i roll it out from my second bedroom slash office and bring it out into this big space so i can enjoy you know the fresh air and the big soft box of window that i have in front of me and dang it just disconnected again what is happening with my phone so anyway this this shows everything off really nicely um i actually have a couple of now portable monitors that i can disconnect and i can put on stands and then i can hang them back up onto the arms that are attached to rick and my teleprompter stays on here i've got a sony zb10 behind a glide gear uh tm tmp 50 i think so it's the smallest uh it's one of the smaller sizes of the glide gears and just a little ipad mini version two super old uh acting as my teleprompter in front of me and i use that i've got you and looking at those great pictures of my my rig you know right in front of me which is really nice and then i've got my sure mv7 on an elgato low profile boom arm that i can adjust to a whole lot of other places yeah there you go that's a that's a good uh shot of that and yeah and you can also see that i have the staple of every live streamer setup the stream deck excel which is really really uh crucial to the whole the whole execution of any live stream i think if you if you can't press buttons and and have fun with uh making things happen and occasionally things not happening then you know you're really missing out there's lots of great automations you can do with those stream decks so yeah i just for me even though it does add an element of friction and that is for me as an individual to to address that um yeah getting that setup so that i can go live so i can produce my videos or record my videos that's a little bit of work but you know what it's a way bigger friction for me to put on lashes so it's not a big deal and i've i've gotten pretty fast at the setup and you know the take back down into my office i love how versatile it is so it's a really good fit for me yeah i was going to say i mean there is obviously you know a slight bit of uh you say friction there to actually get it set up but the the thing you get from that is you get you know your your apartment back when you're not using it so uh i think there's a huge benefit there but just do just for those that are listening on audio i mean it's it reminds me of a bit of medical equipment because it's got like this three wheel tripod at the bottom and then a single pole coming up and everything's just hanging off that pole it just looks like it should have a an IV on it or something like that as well there's all the cables and i'm holding half of them because i don't want them the wheels to get tripped and then for anything to fall over and um and actually i've got uh a few little um uh i i don't know what they call it but they're they're half pound weight add-ons my my partner's a trainer and he was like oh i bet if we tape these onto the legs it'll help with the stability right and so i've got about i don't know three pounds worth of these extra weights strapped on to the stand to just to help it more stable but as i'm leading it around it looks like i'm taking a journey down the hospital hallway nice and slow nothing too fast don't trip over a cable you know the whole thing so yeah it's it's pretty fun but uh it it works like a charm for me so i'm it took me a while to figure out how to set it up and it's just like all of us we're we're messing around with our setups and changing things and removing things all the time and uh so it's it continues to evolve well it's it it's an absolute work of art so i'm so impressed with it i've been in love with it since the day i've been trying to figure out how i can uh you know have a justification to have something like that because it just looks so looks so amazing yeah but you've got your gorgeous little recording studio slash workspace in in what would you call it would you call it like a cottage or yeah it's got your stuff at building little cottage at the bottom of the garden yeah and you've been able to make that exactly what you want you've got your lighting and you know everything and and the the benefit to that full time area is that you just come in and you can start to record right away and you know what you've got you know what your lighting is going to be you everything's consistent the sound is going to be the same sometimes i surprise myself with how dark it gets or something like that yeah but for me it's i i like that i i like that little bit of uncertainty the things that throw me off or the variability like oh my complexion looks a little different right now because the sun's going down it's it's it's okay and maybe someday i'll change that and i'll want to have a very dedicated disciplined space where nothing changes but right now this is what i want well it looks it looks really cool and for anyone who's listening as i say definitely go and check out either the link to keely's page where she yeah she shows it all off or also go obviously come and check out the the recording as well well we're at the top of the hour time has flown by as as it always does when we get together and start talking but i always like to ask what is the sort of one bit of advice that you'd give to somebody i could say for live stream of actually i think today it's more appropriate to talk about discord and like what is the the one bit of advice that you would give to somebody that's considering discord or maybe on the fence about whether they should take the plunge or not i think it's the same advice that we would give anybody else in the live streaming or video production is just do it because you will learn through doing so that's something that you embodied right away you just launched yourself into clicking some buttons and setting up your own server and giving it a start and through that process you got to know what your needs were going to be a lot better so that when i did come into the picture and gave you a little piece of pieces of advice you had something to couch that into and no mistake is permanent nothing is going to blow up everything isn't going to fall down you're going to have little mishaps you're going to go in the wrong direction occasionally but you can fix that and you can change that and the one thing that's certain about all of the tools that we use is that we are going to have to migrate someday so don't be afraid to think oh i'm not going to try discord because you know what in five years it's going to be something else you're absolutely right it is going to be something else or maybe it'll be 10 years or maybe it'll be two years who knows lots of things can change but what can serve you right now what can get you to that next level with your people with your technology with what you're producing with the relationships that you're forging get on it now and don't procrastinate out of fear of doing it wrong because we're all doing it wrong all the time but there's enough right in there that we're meeting our goals and we're moving ahead and that's the fun part so just just get in there dive in great advice i know you've helped me to undo a number of the mistakes that i made at the beginning so yeah it's just by getting in there as you're saying trying it out and and giving it a go can you perhaps tell people what you've got coming up because i know that you're you're going to be speaking at people a video in the end is that just next week that's that's come on quickly isn't it maybe you can talk a lot about it oh yeah i'm like wow it's a week tomorrow and i have a speech to write so uh yeah i'm going to get off this podcast recording and get that done as soon as i can um yeah people of video is going to be incredible to be on this stage with so many content creators including our mentor doc rock um to be able to to absorb that environment and to speak in public again like you've done a ton of public speaking as well and that's something that we haven't been able to do for years so that's just going to be crazy to actually be able to see people's i'll be able to reach out and like touch them if not a creepy way but just you're right there boop their noises and everything so um i'm really really looking forward to that uh but a piece of feedback that i've been gathering from my community and people that i'm interacting with about discord as people said you know i i really wish that i could do a step by step going through with somebody and setting up a server like can somebody be there so i am launching a waitlist for a discord server it would help if i could say these things discord server bootcamp so it's going to be at server bootcamp.com not until this is actually like recorded properly and you've you've you've released it next week so if you're watching this live it's not ready yet but i'm just collecting interest and making sure that this is something that is actually going to help people and in that bootcamp we would sit literally in a discord and we would sit in a voice channel we would build another server as we're talking through things in a in a step by step way that helps you learn what the principles are about roles and about permissions and about cascading hierarchies and about adding bots and things like that so that's what i've got in the horizon server bootcamp.com i just sprung that on you you didn't know i was going to say that so we'll have to get it that is so valuable though that is because i mean that's exactly what you know that you did for me you know when we were sat sat down and talking about well how should i do this how should i do that and there is you know a certain learning curve to it as there is with anything that's any new platform and to have that ability to be able to go through and sort of go through step by step and be shown because it's actually really simple who wants you know how and when somebody's shown you so to have somebody go through like you and just show people the the steps that they need to take that's going to be such an awesome awesome thing i highly recommend that already thanks i haven't made it yet but yeah everybody come on in cross and now that now that you have validated the idea i'll have to do it yeah and what about if people want um yeah you know some other consulting what do you do in in that respect because obviously you've helped helped me with my server there's the cam server doc server and that to name just a few um so yes how else can they yet they interact with you on that yeah so if you the center of everything obviously for for everyone is is their website for me discordforcreators.com and i do offer full white glove server setup uh services so if you're the kind of person who's like yeah i'm going to be into it once it's done but i don't have the time it's actually a very time consuming process to set these things up there's a lot of buttons to click it's really not very automated and things like that so you can come in and and i've priced it based on where your community is at the time so if you're just starting out you know we're not going to go crazy we don't have to do too much but it includes getting things set up helping train you helping train your moderators so that you can start building that community towards what you want and since i'm a big membership person and of course conductor i guess um that that is something that i definitely encourage and can set up for you in your servers as well so just pop on over there there's a nice shot of of doc and i sitting sitting side by side doing something exactly like this um but you can also find me on all the socials and things like that i obviously have a discord for creator server so that's discordforcreators.com forward slash ds stands for discord server in case you weren't sure and uh you can come in and pepper me with questions there and i love helping out because every question i get is an opportunity for me to learn again what people are looking for and what they need so it's very valuable for me so don't ever think that you can't ask me questions because i i i love to hear it perfect that's a perfect place to wrap it up on and thank you so much for coming in and sharing all of this obviously all the links to everywhere you can connect with keely as well you'll find in the description on the video or in the uh the show notes for the podcast as well and yeah just thanks so much for not just the podcast but all that you've helped me with too it's it's really been there as i say a game changer for what i'm doing in my content creation journey fully mutual alec you've been so helpful for me i've learned so much from you about all the tech and all the strategies automation particular i mean people if you want to know about stream deck things you can do and keyboard maestro this this is the wait yes this is the place right here you want to go for you you want to come to this guy and uh i i really appreciate your help right back so thank you for this and thank you for the time and in hanging on the live streamer backstage thanks so much and uh yeah we'll we'll keep chatting no doubt in the in the backstage area afterwards thanks again keely it's been a real real pleasure thank you well in the next episode of the live streamer backstage podcast i'm going to be joined by andrew jenkins and we'll be talking about empowering business leaders to build high performance teams through live streaming andrew founded pdx consulting nearly two decades ago to evangelize high performance team work from the inside out a radical new idea linking coaching soft skills and mindset to forge thriving workplaces and in that time they have worked with many well-known global brands and last year andrew started leaders live a weekly live stream talk show to both serve his large community and also act as a marketing tool in his business so i'm interested to understand how he's accomplishing both of those aims so effectively and of course the lessons he has learned all along the way of live streaming will also naturally touch on the importance of high performance teamwork in business and how he fosters that through his live streams as always it is sure to be another insightful conversation so i look forward to seeing you there in the meantime have an absolutely wonderful week ahead