This month my husband and I had a super fun virtual baby shower with our out-of-town family and friends. We live in Nashville, Tennessee and most of our family and many good friends live in Texas where we both grew up. When I asked you guys if you wanted to know how we did a virtual baby shower lots of you said yes so here you go!
Maybe you’re wondering why a virtual baby shower? Couldn’t you travel to Texas and do it in person? Sure, we could have. But this mama just didn’t feel comfortable with traveling the 9-10 hours in a car or flying. And then trying to navigate how to get all the gifts back to Tennessee. This is just what we chose to do because it worked best for us and our family/friends were on board!
Preparing For The Shower
We googled virtual baby showers when we first had the idea of doing a shower that way. There are TONS of different ways to go about it. We chose to keep it fairly simple.
First, whoever is hosting the shower for you needs to create an Event on Facebook for the date and time of your shower. This way you can communicate with everyone who will be attending in a private manner that is only visible to your guests. You could possibly do this in a private group that you create as well, but we used the Event option.
Add a description and photo to the event that makes it obvious to your invitees what it is. Think of the description as your invitation if you were to mail it out to your guests. My sister-in-law hosted ours and came up with a cute little poem that also communicated that this shower was to allow our friends and family who live far away to be a part of all the things leading up to baby coming.
Now it’s time to invite your guests! Facebook makes this really easy to do. You’ll see an obvious place to invite people inside the event when you begin to create it. And don’t worry if you think of someone later that you forgot to invite. You can always invite others even up to the date of your event.
The person who creates the event can invite people. And that person can make anyone a co-host of the event and the co-host can also invite people. Note that you can only invite people who are your friends on Facebook. So if there are family friends of your uncle who need to be invited, but for whatever reason you are not yet connected to them on Facebook you’ll need to either make a friend request to that person or add your uncle as a co-host so he can invite them if he is already Facebook friends with them.
The options for what you post within the event are really limitless. You can include your virtual shower guests in as much of the fun as you like. We revealed the gender of our baby to our guests with a fun post in the group. We also let our guests place their bets on whether they thought it was a boy or a girl before the reveal. You could go all out with a full-on gender reveal if you wanted to and post a video or even do a live video gender reveal inside the event.
The Virtual Shower
A typical baby shower includes gifts and you may be wondering how in the world that could work long distance. Fortunately, we live in a world where online registries are very common. Amazon has EVERYTHING! Including baby registries (and two-day shipping)! Can I get an amen for Amazon? LOL
We provided direct links to our online registries in a post within the event and made sure to give our guests about four weeks to shop if they wanted to. All the gifts were shipped to our door!
The beautiful flowers in this photo were sent by my mother-in-love for the day of the shower. I used this tripod from Amazon to hold my phone for the live video so I could be hands free.
It was so fun to start seeing packages showing up on our doorstep almost daily (and sooooo hard to not open them!) Any time a gift would arrive I would take it and just started to make a pile in a designated area out of the way until the date of our shower arrived.
Opening The Gifts
On the day of your shower, you will go into your event at the designated time and make a post. You can say something like, “It’s time! We’re live!” Then in the options for the post where you would choose to add a photo or video, look for the live video option. This will broadcast your video in real time to your guests. I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with this feature in advance of your shower date if you’ve never used a live video on Facebook. It’s super easy, you just want to know what you’re doing when the time comes for your shower.
Once you hit the “go live” button your video will be live and you will slowly begin to see the names of who is watching as your guests join the live video. Your guests will need to know that they need to go into the event for the shower and look for your live video at the appropriate time. If they happen to get to the event page before you go live, they may need to keep refreshing the page periodically to be able to see when you go live. It’s helpful to provide a post with this information in advance of the live video.
Once you are live, you can talk to all your guests and open the gifts they sent to you while they watch! Your guests will be able to interact with you in the comments, but you won’t be able to hear them or see them. There IS a feature on Facebook live video where you can pull someone else up on the screen with you and it becomes like a FaceTime call. But it’s a little finicky and we tried it with no success so we didn’t end up using it. The shower was still so fun without that though and everyone was able to communicate with us in the comments.
One other technical note for you – we chose to use my iPhone to do the live video. If you’re using a phone, I suggest that after you type in your description and tap the live video camera, you turn your phone horizontally. This will turn the video to landscape and personally I think it’s better to watch this way. Be sure you turn the phone BEFORE you hit “go live”. Again, I recommend testing the live video so you are familiar before the time of your shower comes. Ask whoever is hosting the virtual shower for you to join you in the event to do the test and make sure everything works properly.
That’s it! You can add more bells and whistles to your shower as it fits your personalities – games, more posts and videos in advance of the shower, etc. And then your family can sit back and enjoy watching you receive all the gifts they send. If you have super techy friends and family (like some of ours) they can even choose to connect their computer to their TV screen and meet in one place to watch the live video together.
If anyone is unable to catch the live video for any reason, you can choose to post or share the video in the event once you’re finished. This will allow those people to go back to the event and watch the video replay later.
I hope this was helpful. And that maybe it helps someone in our same situation with lots of loved ones far away. It’s just not always feasible to travel in these situations and I’m so thankful we were still able to share this experience with our family and friends who live so far away.
If you missed my blog where I shared all about our infertility journey you can read that HERE.
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Hi there, Congrats on your new addition! This post was very helpful as I am planning my sister’s shower this way during the pandemic.
My only questions for you are 1) how many people did end up joining the live and how did you navigate the comments? Did you or someone read them aloud as people commented? And 2) did you end up playing any games?
I’m happy I found this post because it’s exactly how I envisioned planning it this way so I’m glad I feel like I am doing something right lol. I already made a post telling people how and where it will be set up when the time comes, and what to expect to see/hear and how guests are able to contribute to the event (via comments/reactions). Thanks again! – Lauren
Hi Lauren, I’m so glad this was helpful to you and also bummed that you are having to plan a shower this way due to the pandemic. To answer your questions, I personally am not a fan of shower games in general so we did not do anything like that. The only “game” we played was in the private group prior to the shower where people guessed if they thought it was a boy or girl and we did a reveal post when we knew. And I don’t recall exactly how many people were on the actual live but it was quite a few. We made sure to post a few reminders in the days leading up to the shower so that people didn’t forget. I was the only one in the room for the actual live and so I tried to read comments as I opened the gifts and to encourage conversation if no one was commenting. I hope that’s helpful and I wish you the best of luck with the shower!