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Livestream Events

As the country grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic, cultural institutions worldwide saw their doors close to the public. Institutions scrambled to create digital offerings to remain relevant and continue their mission.

With the support of generous donors, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association had already been making investments in digital education for seven years. The Mount Vernon website is accessed annually by more than 8 million guests. Our virtual tour and Be Washington interactives have been vital components in classrooms around the country, and we were regularly streaming live events on our Facebook and YouTube channels. 

When Mount Vernon closed its doors to the public for 99 days, the longest since the Civil War, our teams quickly expanded our digital programming. We began hosting daily livestreams from inside the Mansion, the museum, and the estate. We moved our symposiums, book talks, and lectures to virtual events. Our professional staff created workshops on a wide array of topics, from gardening to leadership, and we cultivated and grew a national membership audience through our exclusive members-only programming.

In total, Mount Vernon has hosted more than 153 virtual events since March 2020. We expanded our distribution to include Twitter and LinkedIn. We pioneered new structures for interactive lectures, allowing us to ask the audience questions and display them on the stream. This increased access, and participation now regularly sees hundreds of people tuning in live and thousands of people watching the event on-demand after the event has concluded. 

The lessons learned in 2020 are being adapted and applied to all future events held at Mount Vernon. Our future hybrid event model will allow members from around the country and world to tune in to every public event, lecture, and symposium. Also, we will continue to hold digital-only events, allowing us to host speakers more easily from around the world. 

Today, Mount Vernon reaches more people digitally than we can accommodate in person at any theater at the estate. The ability and experience gained this past year will have a long-lasting impact on our education mission to share the life and legacy of George Washington with all Americans.

Discover all Mount Vernon’s livestream events.