Doha Debates partnered with Bradford Literature Festival for the 10th anniversary of their event to produce an engaging live debate for audiences in the United Kingdom. We knew that the focus for a literature festival should be on narrative power, and we also wanted to fully engage the international students and recent graduates that were chosen to participate in the discussion. To that end, we chose three powerful speakers to debate the influence that the West has over global narratives of social justice, ensuring that each one represented a different perspective on the issue. Our discussion questions touched on pressing topics in the news like the conflict in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, as well as relevant historical incidents like 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan. The town hall also incorporated compelling pre-produced digital elements like explanatory videos and poll results to further engage the audience and add important context.
A Doha Debates town hall takes an extraordinary amount of talent and teamwork to create.
Much of our time and energy is spent on editorial framing. The key to a good town hall is to hone in on an incisive debate question that will engage both the speakers and the audience; a question that does not have a simple answer, but one that has immediate intrigue.
We then engage a cohort of students and recent graduates to participate onstage in the discussion, driving the conversation with their questions and comments. They apply to participate and, once accepted, go through a rigorous, weeks-long onboarding and training process where they engage with the topic and learn how to participate successfully in a live Doha Debates event. For this town hall, our onstage audience hailed from Doha, Qatar and across the UK; some traveled long distances just for the opportunity to attend.
We make a great effort to find the perfect guests for each town hall, looking for speakers who can offer a breadth of opinions that land on a wide spectrum. Ultimately, we try to find experts with strong views who are also open to changing their minds based on new evidence and arguments presented during the town hall. The capacity to compromise and the ability to listen are core Doha Debates values, so we seek these characteristics in all of our guests.
Each town hall is a massive team effort that includes travel coordination, extensive production and multiple rehearsals. In the case of our BLF town hall, we also had an entirely new set built on-site by a brand-new collaborator.
When the live show ends, the work continues for our digital team, who strategize and release a full video version on our website and YouTube channel and create clips for social media, engaging audiences far beyond the in-person event.
We measure success through both digital and in-person metrics. In the room, we seek to produce a one-of-a-kind, exciting, educational event that is a positive and memorable experience for our expert speakers, our onstage student participants and our audience members. This town hall delivered just that. The conversation was spirited—sometimes fiery—but always respectful. Students and recent graduates were given the opportunity to hold renowned experts’ feet to the fire, and the audience in our packed venue remained captivated for the entire 90-minute-long event.
As we like to say, the debate does not end on the stage. Following the event, we published the full town hall online and across all of our social media channels and podcast feed, where the thought-provoking conversation continues to this day. Strategically, we also co-posted a variety of powerful moments and clips from the show with our guests and student participants, further extending the reach of the event. To date, the full town hall has been viewed over 550,000 times on YouTube, and shorter clips have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times across all our channels.
Organic engagement is incredibly important to us as well. To date, our full town hall has received over 9,000 comments. It’s also notable that the watch time for this town hall is roughly 40% longer than other Doha Debates videos, which speaks to the dynamic format, the high quality of production and the resonance of the debate topic.
