Discord Transforms Fresh Inc Festival

It’s mid-March 2020. All is going to plan as Fifth House Ensemble prepares for our yearly summer music program - Fresh Inc Festival. It’s a wonderful time to work with young chamber musicians and composers on rehearsal techniques, the business side of music, and interact during a lot of fun social events. Suddenly, we must move our festival to an online format to safely proceed during a global pandemic. How will we maintain this very important aspect of our festival: communication? The terror of having to do it all through email and Zoom calls literally posed a life or death threat to the festival. If the participants felt that we might fail at something so important like communication, the future of Fresh Inc could be in jeopardy.

Enter: Discord!

Discord is a gaming chat/server platform, and ended up being a more than suitable replacement for our Fresh Inc Festival social events.

Fortunately, the gaming world stepped up to help us once more with its inventive and relentless sense of community. By having members on our roster that take part in the gaming world, we were able to discover some of the marvels that Discord could do for us. Thanks Deuce!

Discord is a versatile chatting platform that allows you to create public or private servers, chat groups, and audio/video chat rooms - essentially, any space to share a common interest with friends. For our 2020 digital edition of Fresh Inc Festival, we were put at a substantial advantage with this tailored, organized, and easy-to-access communication platform.

Ultimately, our Fresh Inc Discord page became a sort of online campus where participants, faculty, and technical support specialists were able to easily find and participate in all the projects. Our Discord platform was divided into five categories: communication, group projects, general chat, breakout rooms, and an entire portal for management and faculty. Being able to categorize pretty much everything we needed was the key to a successful online festival. We were even able to host a S’mores recipe (and eating) contest with live voting!

Ideally we would have been in-person with our amazing participants. We look forward to hosting in-person Fresh Inc Festivals again in the future. We are also grateful and proud that we were all able to adapt and make a less than ideal situation magical.

To learn more about Fresh Inc Festival, head to our website!