Americans have among the fewest national work holidays in the international community. It's pretty easy for us to schedule events targeted at an American demographic and know that we aren't trying to attract a business audience on a national holiday. But if you are trying to reach an international audience things get much trickier.
Many American companies think in terms of regions. "We'll target this at EMEA" or "We'll target that at APAC." For those of you not familiar with those acronyms, EMEA stands for Europe/Middle East/Africa and APAC stands for Asia/Pacific. They are standard ways of grouping responsibilities for worldwide sales in many US companies.
Unfortunately, companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa don't exactly think of themselves as one big happy family, all bound by the same work customs. Even if you take a more compact area such as continental Europe, you will find that work schedules may vary significantly from country to country.
When deciding on dates for your webinars, get in touch with your regional sales or support managers responsible for the countries you are targeting. They ought to know about the events from the start, as they may be able to offer help with content or issues that are important to their prospects and customers in the region. But they can also help you avoid scheduling disasters, when you choose a date that is a work holiday in their area.
If you don't have access to "feet on the ground" in a country, you can turn to the Web for help. One of the most useful utilities I have found is a pop-up Internet application that lets you enter a date and see an alphabetical list of countries that observe that date as a "Bank Holiday" (the common term for a nationally-recognized holiday that has a good chance of being observed by businesses). The application is available at http://www.ddi.co.uk/International_Holidays-new.htm
Another approach is to enter a specific country and see a list of bank holidays they observe. One utility I found for this is available at the Q++ Holidays Portal. This site seems to be tremendously authoritative on the subject of international holidays. It has a lot of ways to check all bank holidays for a country or all countries observing a date. They include footnotes for people who need detailed information.
I wish I had known about these sites earlier. They might have helped me avoid some low turnouts for international events.
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