Our My Royal Borough Community is a resilient one. We are inspired by your stories of adapting and pivoting to lockdown. Next in our series of Lockdown Heroes, we are pleased to feature Tuneless Choir Maidenhead.

Everything you need to know right here 

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Get in touch: maidenhead@tunelesschoir.com  

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Prior to the pandemic, the Tuneless Choir Maidenhead met weekly on a Wednesday night at the United Reformed Church in Maidenhead, where they averaged in person attendance of about 70-80 people each week and raised the roof with their ‘tuneless’ singing. Their last in-person session took place on 11th March 2020. They experimented going online, working hard to test what it would mean to deliver an ‘online’ version of the choir trialling different platforms and equipment. The latency of the internet made it impossible to actually sing ‘together’ so Tabitha Beaven and the choir had to adopt a singing ‘along’ model - granted this may have been a slightly easier transition for the Tuneless choir. For as Tabitha says, “We have never tried to teach singing and learn parts, more facilitate a joyful sing-song and embracing the noises that comes out of our mouths - even the dodgy ones!”

Recognising that ‘zoom’ was not necessarily a familiar tool to all our attendees, they held a number of ‘tea and chat’ sessions and created a number of guides to help everyone feel familiar with the technology - which went on to enable them to connect with friends and family too.

A year on, they’ve run 49 online sessions as they celebrated ‘One Year On… line’ on 24 March 2021. To keep it fresh the group had various different themes from celebrating VE Day to Musicals nights, and they “time travelled” through the 60s, 70s and 80s and even had a pyjama party where everyone zoomed in their pyjamas and dressing gowns.

And around various points in the year, as guidance allowed, they also managed to hold two in person sessions, singing outdoors at the Maidenhead Football Club in the stands, using the seats as dividers to ensure they were all adequately socially distanced.

The Maidenhead Tuneless Choir is a wonderful example of how any organisation can overcome technological barriers to delivering a service to a large, diverse audience where engagement and entertaining were central factors to success. Dealing with the uncertainty of the lockdown, and keeping their audience and customers interested and engaged - especially with so much competition in the online market for free entertainment, were more challenges they had to overcome. 

Here are some Q&A we’ve asked of our businesses about coping with lockdown as a small business.

We are inspired by their responses:  

If you could respond to lockdown as a business over again, would you do anything differently? 

I’m really pleased with how we responded and how soon we were able to move to an online model that worked. I was really conscious that rather than try to ‘recreate’ what we did in person, we had to create something that worked with the online format which is more visual.

I guess the only thing we might do differently is being able to make use of new technology that reduces the latency of the internet although I expect this is not cheap and currently relies on people having a hard wired connection rather than using wifi so not sure it’s realistic!

What did you learn about your customers, your community, your business, yourself?

I learnt what I already knew about our community - that they are amazing. The support and camaraderie that they offered me and each other was phenomenal, both in our Facebook members group and at our online sessions.

One of the most heartwarming things many members of our community have done has ‘gifted’ places - when paying for their own session, they paid more so that members of our community who were unable to pay at this time, were still able to attend. With any excess gifts being donated to Bucks & Berks Mind. We were able to donate over £300 via this route in 2020 so a win, win for all.

I also already knew that personally I had a pretty big streak of resilience however this last year really has tested this to it’s limit. It’s been nice to see that the time and energy invested in building the Tuneless community over the last 4 and a half years has paid dividends in how much the community have wanted to stick together and support each other.

Here’s some feedback I’ve received from some of our members when we hit our one year online anniversary:

“Thanks for a great session last night Tabitha, you've pulled us through the year with great gusto!” - Jan Challis

“This past year would have been so much harder to get through without Tuneless. Wednesday night has been my best night of the week.

Take the praise you deserve for coming through for us when you’ve had your own struggles and being the one to make Lockdown bearable. You go above and beyond, what a gem Tuneless has in you.” Gill Lowe

If you could give words of advice or encouragement to others, what would you say?

We never know what life is going to throw our way so my words of advice and encouragement would be to work with what you DO have and celebrate what you CAN do and what you HAVE achieved rather than get stuck in thinking about what we CAN’T do and wanting things to be different from how they are. I fell into this trap a couple times until I was able to shift my mindset to something that felt more positive and ultimately more helpful.

Oh and of course, choose to ‘sing like no one is listening’ - it really does feel fab. You’re very welcome to do it with us!