The Webinar Blog

Making Life Easier For Webinar Presenters – An Organizer’s Checklist

I usually write about tips for being a good web presenter, but I thought I would change the focus to speak to individuals who organize and set up web events using somebody else to speak. You may call upon presenters within your own organization or invite guests from outside your company. There may be one presenter or several. No matter what the specifics, there are little things you can do to make your speakers more comfortable and effective at accomplishing your webinar goals, while also giving them confidence in your professional competence and support for them.

Here is a quick checklist:

1) Put all communications in writing. Never rely on memory of telephone calls and vocal agreements. Have a planning document or email correspondence handy for reference by all parties. After planning calls, send an email summarizing what was agreed.

2) Give speakers the background of your event. Is it part of a series? What topics have come before and what comes later? Give them links to recordings of earlier webinars in the series. Is it part of a larger marketing or promotional/educational campaign? Let them see the other materials and summarize for them the main thrust of the campaign.

3) Specify the goals of your webinar. What are you driving the audience to do, know, believe? What will be your criteria for judging whether you succeeded or not?

4) Agree on the promotional pitch and key take-aways for the session. The title isn’t the important thing. The important thing is the summary value proposition and benefits you will promise the audience. Work with your presenter up front to create a marketing/promotional cheat sheet that will be used to drive registration/attendance. “You will learn…” and “You will see…” statements tell the presenter what materials must be included, because they have been promised to the audience that elected to show up based purely on those statements.

5) Solidify time commitments up front. Book your speaker for a half hour before the scheduled start time of the event and make sure they know the pre-event time is a scheduled part of the session time that they are committing to.

6) Tell your speaker their expected presentation duration. Figure out how many people are speaking, how much time you will spend on “wrapper material” and whether you will include a distinct Q&A session. Based on that, tell your speaker how long they should be prepared to talk for. Make it clear that you expect them to come in on time.

7) Schedule rehearsals and event day activities with electronic calendar appointments. Include the web and phone access information. Make sure it is correct. Include passwords and access codes. Put a 10-15 minute reminder alert on the appointment.

8) Give presenters a clear and unambiguous deadline for submitting their slides. Give yourself enough time to collate, edit, upload, and convert slides (if necessary for your situation).

9) Be prepared at the start of your session. Have the slides uploaded or ready to display. Don’t waste their time during a scheduled rehearsal waiting for you to get the conferencing room set up.

10) Be ready before they are. Be on the phone conference call and in the conferencing room at least 3 minutes before your scheduled start time. You should be ready and waiting for them to arrive so that you do not waste their time.

11) Have a clear and easy to follow technical familiarization orientation planned for your first rehearsal. Tell the speakers what they need to know to be effective in using the web controls. Be organized, having thought through what you will show them and how you will present it in a concise manner that does not overwhelm them.

12) Work out the flow of the presentation ahead of time and present it clearly during your rehearsal. Discuss and agree on whether presenters introduce each other or throw back to you for introductions between speakers.

As an organizer, your job is to support the presenter so they can concentrate on being effective in supporting your goals. Take the time to plan, prepare, and execute this function with the same professionalism you expect from them.

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Engaging Members With Virtual Events – April 13

Do you communicate with your association members using web conferencing? Are you thinking about adding webinars to your mix? On Tuesday of next week (that’s April 13) I’ll be giving a free web seminar with tips and tricks to make sure you capture and engage your audience’s attention before, during, and after your online event.

KRM Information Services is hosting the webinar and they have asked me to also spend time talking about the integration of social media such as Twitter and Facebook with webinar production and delivery. I don’t usually spend much time commenting on that aspect of our increasingly connected business world, so don’t miss this chance to ask your questions about the impact of external communication channels on web conferencing.

Although I’ll be framing my material in the context of associations and their members, you should be able to use the concepts for any web event broadcast to a target audience, so don’t be shy about signing up.

By the way, if you really want to see Twitter promotion in action for a web event, do a Twitter search on “engage2010” and see how many different people KRM has used to announce the upcoming webinar. That helps drive the message to different followers and expands the retweet possibilities. There… You’ve already learned one tip!

For details on the event specifics and time, hie thee hither to http://bit.ly/cu2xf9 

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My WebinarHero Interview About Webinars

Blaine Ung invited me to share my insights and opinions about webinars (along with a bit of personal background). He has posted the interview on his blog as part of an “Ask The Experts” series. You can read it by clicking this link or visiting http://bit.ly/molayinterview

Thanks for the opportunity to participate, Blaine!

 

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A Few Random Wishes For Webinar Features

After I wrote a post about a web conferencing feature I’d like to see, Dan challenged me to give a longer list of features I’d like in my ideal webinar product. I don’t really want to play generic product manager for the entire industry, but here are a few ideas that I dug out of an old post from the previous incarnation of this blog. There are a lot, so I am only going to give a quick “general concept” summary of each one. There are many details that would have to be worked out for real implementation, and I am fully aware that practical considerations determine how or whether they could work in any given product. But my advantage is that I don’t have to worry about that… I’m not building the software!

I’ll also readily admit that some of these exist in certain products already. But I don’t think anybody has the full set.

1) Support all PowerPoint animations and slide transitions, up to and including PPT 2007. Also support embedded fonts in a slide deck. I am tired of trial and error when I get a client’s slide deck to see which effects and fonts survive conversion and which don’t.

2) If notes are present in a PowerPoint presentation, give the presenter the option to see them while presenting (the audience should not see them).

3) Allow uploading and addition/replacement of a single slide in an existing presentation deck. This allows fast last-minute changes without forcing a reload of the entire presentation.

4) Allow upload of multiple slide presentations to a single meeting room, with fast and easy switching capabilities between presentations within a live session.

5) A presenter should be able to view or hide things such as chat, notes, thumbnails, etc and swap between full screen and windowed mode without changing the view for other presenters.

6) Give me a mode toggle when annotating slides for replace vs. add annotations. In replace mode, every time I add a new annotation, the previous one is automatically deleted. This would let me quickly put things like boxes or arrows on the screen to highlight the next topic of interest without having to do explicit delete steps first to get rid of old highlights.

7) Let presenters quickly see cumulative feedback results for the entire room at a glance. If you allow audience feedback settings, give presenters a concise summary of results without having to scan the attendee list.

8) Allow presenters to set priority levels or other indicators on queued questions that have been typed in by the audience.

9) Allow multiple choice polling with multiple responses per respondent ("Click all that apply"). Don’t restrict the number of allowed answer choices to a poll. Add more polling types (rating/ranking, drop-downs, points distribution).

10) Support synchronized viewing of video clips so everyone finishes at the same time and is ready to continue with the live program content. Probably technically impossible, so at least give me an indicator of how many attendees have reached the end of the clip on their computer.

11) Allow multiple modes when sharing web pages with attendees:  (a) View only (audience can't affect display – classic screen sharing); (b) Follow me (audience members can interact with the web page on their computers, but Presenter can force the page back to a synchronized mode to show the next thing of interest); (c) Local interactivity (audience has full local interaction with the page and the presenter can’t affect their display)

12) Allow quick “bulk delete” of chat messages so I can ask the audience for trivial interactions like their name or home state and quickly delete the answers to more easily see the real submitted questions. For really big audiences, I’d like to set a marker before and after asking the question… Everything submitted in the chat between the markers gets deleted.

13) More interaction features! More! More! More! Interactive maps, games (like quiz shows), anything that gives me optional tools to engage my audience and get their hands on the keyboard and mouse.

14) Software-based integration of third-party audio. I should be able to connect to any audio conference line and web stream the audio as well as feeding it into my recording. No more hardwired bridges between my phone and computer mike input.

15) Integrate registration data with attendance data. Don’t make me manually link two reports to see full registration details along with each person’s chat messages, poll results, time in room, etc.

16) Add payment processing as an option for registration. There are a ton of specifics that go with this.

17) More customization options for registration pages. Let me insert custom text between input fields. Allow conditional display of fields. Let me change the order and labels for all fields, including the vendor’s standard required fields. Let me place items next to each other. Let me change font for labels.

That’s plenty to start with!

 

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