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Welcome. This is Behind the Scenes of TechSoup Talks.
We are going to be going step-by-step through the process of producing a webinar.
My name is Kami Griffiths, and I am joined by Shawn Cardinal from ReadyTalk
and my coworker Becky Wiegand from TechSoup.
We are going to do some quick introductions. Shawn, would you like to introduce yourself?
Shawn: I sure well. This is Shawn Cardinal. I am the training director here at ReadyTalk
which is the service everybody is joining on. I have been with the company
since we were more of a small startup, and had the opportunity to train hundreds if not thousands
of folks, not only to use the service but also act as a coach
for some of these larger type presentations. So it is a pleasure to be here.
Thanks again for inviting me Kami.
Kami: Well, thanks for joining. And I really admire Shawn's presentation style
and have tried to not necessarily mimic, because I have my own way of being,
but to know that your audio is such an important part of the overall webinar.
And if you are not very interesting sounding, people are not going to be paying attention to you
as well as they would when you are as engaging as Shawn is.
So I would also like to introduce Becky Wiegand. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Becky: Sure, thanks Kami. I am Becky Wiegand. I work here at TechSoup as a staff writer,
and I also help conduct and produce webinars. So you will see me mostly in the background
listed as the chairperson on this webinar managing the chat
and answering your questions there. I will also be taking those questions
and holding them aside until the Q&A section at the end of the webinar
so that your questions are fielded to primarily Shawn and Kami
who will be the featured speakers today.
So thanks so much for having me on. And feel free to talk to me via chat.
Kami: Great, thanks Becky.
Here's a quick run down of what we are going to be covering today.
I'm going to talk for just a couple minutes about the history of our program here
and why we got started and how we get started, and then another short bit about the preplanning,
the things you need to think about. I'm not spending a lot of time on that
because we have some of the webinars we've done then I can point you to,
but really spending the meat of the time talking about planning, preparation, producing,
and then what you do after the webinar.
So I wanted to — first is the history. So we work grant funded a couple of years ago
to offer some webinars. And we realized okay, this is something that we have the capacity to do,
and we were funded to test it out. So we started offering these webinars. And since then,
for about a year and a half now we have offered 40. And we have made our mistakes
along the way and learn how to do it a little bit better.
And I feel like we are doing a pretty good jo Bnow, and happy to be sharing our lessons learned
with you. Luckily for us, we have a partnership with ReadyTalk that allows us to offer these free
to the community. So that is another reason why we are able to do this.
And in the time that we have done this nearly 10,000 people have registered for our webinars.
So it has been a real treat for us to offer these to the community.
And the things that you need to think about before you get started —
ideally this webinar is for folks who have already decided that webinars are something
that they want to do. I am not here to convince you that this is something that is for you,
but you are already kind of there and you want to know how do I get started.
But before you can get started really, there are some things you need to think about.
So as far as the goal of the program, what are you hoping to accomplish? Is it staff training?
Are you doing another type of training for your constituents?
Do you want a more engaging conference call, so web conferencing?
Do you want to do out reach to your community, or have a promotional campaign
for some of the work that you're doing, or to provide advocacy for a cause?
So these are some of the goals that you might want to think about
as well as tracking the expenses and the staff time so that you can after you are done figure out
okay, was this worth the time that we put into it? So those are some things to think about
as far as the goals. Now what tools to use, we are of course using ReadyTalk.
But there are probably a dozen tools out there and they all have different things that they offer,
different prices, different number of participants. They have lots of different qualities
that you want to do some research on. And I did a webinar with Laura Quinn about a year ago,
Laura Quinn from Ideaware, and we will be sending you a link to this webinar as well
as the article that she wrote that compares online conferencing tools.
And this will be something that you want to do some research on
if you haven't already settled on a tool.
So some of the differences between the tools are the presenter, you could be videoed
and you could show yourself videoed. You could have more interaction between the participants.
I've been on a tool where allowed breakout rooms, breakout chat rooms
where the participants could chat with each other. There is a White Board feature in some tools
where you can kind of like a meeting, you can have a White Board with in a space
and you could use that as participants to share information. And there are different ways
for the participants to interact and use different tools, and the cost is different.
So we are not going to go into great detail into that, because we just don't have time.
But just know there is a webinar out there that you can watch and an article to read.
So I just want to do a quick question for everybody out there.
I would like you to raise your hand if you are currently offering webinars.
So please just pressed to raise hand a button if this is something that you are currently doing.
Great. So I would say about a quarter, a little over a quarter of you guys,
and just so you know we have about 50 people on right now. So of those if you could chat into me,
what is the tool that you are using just to take a little gauge of —
Shawn: And Kami, one quick note, I really like what you said about their really are a lot of tools
out there, and each one is going to offer something slightly different
to differentiate themselves. So I would encourage everyone to really think about
what we've got here. What is your goal and what is going to be the best tool,
the most reliable tool to get you there? And there will be some other things that you want
to think about. But just make sure you think about what's most important to you.
Sometimes you don't need the one that guilded. Sometimes it is better to have something
that may be would serve your purpose just a little bit more tightly without all the bells and whistles.
Kami: Excellent, great point. So I am just going to list off some of the tools that people
on this call are using. We've got Wimba which I've used before.
Oh, I see Becky has put it in the chat. Wimba that I have used for libraries. There is WebEx.
There is GoToMeeting. We will follow-up with some of these,
but thank you for sharing that with us.
So on to the next bullet. Who will organize and produce the webinars?
These are slightly time-consuming and it will require some dedicated staff to be responsible
for it. So for example, for costs, we estimate it takes about 20 to 25 hours
just for us to organize each webinar, and I will go into greater detail what those steps are.
But that is it good chunk of time. In fact, it is pretty much my full-time job here
is to organize the webinars with Becky's assistance.
So that's something to take into consideration. And what is your capacity for doing out reach,
and how many people do you want serve? All the different parts of organizing the webinar
would require a presenter and perhaps a producer which we will talk about more later,
and someone to answer the questions on the chat like we have here with Becky.
So those are other things to think about. Do you have the staff that can take care of that?
And then the cost, the tools that are out there, there's some tools that offer some capabilities
that are free but they are very limited, so you do get what you pay for it.
So if this is something that you are serious about, understand the cost and then budget for it
so you know that this is something you can continue to offer.
And Shawn, did you have anything you wanted to add?
Shawn: I did, on that cost side of things. And one thing that you will notice that I won't be doing
today is trying to sell you guys on ReadyTalk which isn't what I do anyway.
But I do want to alert you of some pitfalls. As you are doing your due diligence on the cost side
of things, please check into those hidden costs. There may be some instances
where you see on the front end that is going to cost X, Y or Z or be free.
But again, you get what you pay for. And just be aware of that cost proposition.
In some cases it may be very inexpensive on the audio side of things,
but the quality may not be very good. So look at that balance as you are going through those,
and be sure to ask those questions, maybe see a sample invoice.
Maybe they can black out the customers and that kind of thing.
But that might be a good exercise to go through as you are doing that.
Kami: Great, thanks Shawn.
Now are going to move onto the planning process. And this is I would say a big meaty part
of it, the topic. Know that I am going to be speaking from the point of view of me
and TechSoup, and what we do here, but then adding in examples of other organizations,
and Shawn will be adding in other organizations as well.
So when you decide on, okay, what are we doing with this webinar? What's the topic going to be?
After you determine what the topic is, what are you trying to accomplish?
Is it a software training? For example, we have done a couple of trainings on the products
that TechSoup offers through our donation program like ESRI the GIS program,
and Grant Station, and for other product based webinars where during the webinar
we went in and showed the tool. In fact, Shawn will be doing that with ReadyTalk
in a few minutes. So you could do software training. You could just share information
which is another thing that we do here at TechSoup is we take a topic
like the ROI of social media which is one that we did just a month and a half ago.
So we pick the topic and then once you pick the topic,
then you had to figure out who the speakers going to be.
Some other examples of the purpose of the webinar is to have a training or an idea,
like a more in-depth training. And I have seen this happen well, and I've seen this happen
really poorly. It is very difficult to take, to duplicate and in person training on the Internet.
There is no body language that you can see. It is difficult to get people to partner together
and work on something. So it's like if you think of the in-person workshops you've been in,
trying to make that happen on the Internet is a little challenging.
But I was in one that had a tool that allowed people to kind of pair u
and kind of do some chatting that way, and it was actually a pretty interesting way of going about it.
But it really depends on the tool and how the tool allows the participants to engage
with one another. And so I wanted to ask another question, of those of you who
are currently offering webinars if you could just tell us what is the purpose
of your current webinars that you are offering, or web conferencing?
And while we wait for those to come in on the chat, Shawn,
did you want to add something here?
Shawn: Well, I think on that topic in the purpose, I mean we could probably do an entire webinar
just on that one bullet. Some of the things that I've seen go correctly
is when you have determined that topic. When people have really given it some thought,
they really think about the level of detail they need to go when. So they are thinking
about their audience members and some other things to think about.
But be sure on this topic and the purpose that you are giving the value in the language
that people need to hear in the timing that people need to hear this as well.
Sometimes if you have too broad of the subject people may be walking around saying,
tell me something I don't know. If it is to detailed, sometimes they get overwhelmed.
So really think about what you want to get out of that, and then cater that topic and purpose.
And maybe you have to do two webinars to cover it appropriately.
But those are things I would be thinking about on that side of things.
Kami: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And as far as the last bullet, know your audience,
if you know that your audience is a beginner level and you can speak to them,
if you know they are advanced you can speak to them. And I think some of the issues we've had
here at TechSoup is that we try to do something for everybody. And the comments
that we then got are, this is too broad. This was way too much jargon.
Those responses all in the same webinar, so that is an important thing.
So I am just going to read off some of the things that people have put in here;
continuing education, meeting with people scattered all over the state,
charter school information, training and orientation to electronic products
to our client libraries, and a lot of online training for volunteers, and training and sharing
of best practices. So we can see that training is definitely the overall favorite use of this.
I have been on some that are kind of infomercial-ish. And you know, they are interesting,
but to get in there and just kind of dig deep into a topic, I find to be the most interesting ones,
not just to present, but also to listen in on.
Shawn: I was going to say Kami, on my side of the world that is what I see as well.
Training is probably the primary use for this type of tool, and then that kind of information sharing.
Kami: Great. So once you've picked your topic, then finding a speaker. If you are not the speaker,
then who are you going to have to be here and available. So for example,
when I picked the topic I thought instantly of Shawn, and contacted him immediately
and made sure he was available on this date. And then we had a planning call.
So the trick is to try to schedule a speaker before you schedule the webinar,
because we had a webinar scheduled once and a speaker fell through, had to find a speaker
for that specific date, and it was a real challenge getting someone to fit into that.
Make sure that that speaker is someone who is a good presenter,
that they are not too salesy sounding. That's a problem I have here
when we do product based webinars that the presenters my sound like its a big sales pitch.
And that really turns off the folks listening. Maybe somebody who is a really popular person
that might draw more people to attend. You definitely want a subject matter expert.
And the great thing about it is that it doesn't matter where they are located.
I have done webinars with people in other countries and it works perfectly fine.
I'm just very excited about the option of having speakers that are in England for example.
But the one thing also is try not to have to many speakers on at the same time. It is a lot to juggle.
It is a lot of information to try to get into people's head in the short amount of time.
And one webinar that we did with five speakers, just ended up being a bit of a circus.
So that is one thing to take into consideration.
And to talk a little bit about the format of the webinar, we often do our webinars
in an interview type format like a radio interview where I will ask the presenter
a series of pre-determined questions, and then the answer those with their corresponding slides.
And we found that people really like that, that they don't then have to listen to the same person
talk and talk and talk and talk. And it becomes more of the discussion and there are more chat
questions that happen when we do it like that. But it's one way of doing it.
You could have a presenter, and we have done it and all different formats. We've had presenters
speak the entire time. We've had a panel where we had multiple people speaking.
So think about the format that you want to have it, that you'd like to take it on.
And again, to close this slide talking about the audience, just knowing who you
are trying to reach so that you can customize the slides and the messaging for them.
Shawn: And that is the piece that I will talk on a little bit when I share with you how we set u
our webinars this way, and how you can really get into knowing your audience.
And I think that is going to be really valuable tool set whatever platform you choose to use.
Kami: So I just want to take a minute and look at this slide. And this is something I developed
here back probably about a year ago just to help me understand what needed to happen when,
and who was involved where. So this is not going to be applicable for everyone
because we are lucky that we are able to have a coproducer to help the producer.
And in this case, I am technically the producer. I put together the description.
I created the ReadyTalk pages. I did the out reach. I made all of this stuff happen.
And in this case, Becky is the coproducer. So during the webinar she is typing a lot of things.
She is fielding questions. She is dealing with any kind of issues that might be happening,
so I can be talking and I have to worry about that. And the role of the speaker then making sure
that I am talking to them, and that they know what the webinar is about,
and that they have the Power Point slides that they need to add, and that we do a run through
which we will talk about the run through more than a little bit.
And so with anyone if there is additional folks on the chat who are answering questions,
we have often had other experts just on the chat answering questions.
And people like to have that added layer of assistance that in real-time they can be listening,
watching, and responding to chat. And some people don't like to have stuff going on.
So again, it really depends on your audience.
We'll keep moving because time is slipping buy. And I wanted to talk about preparation.
So once you decided what your topic is, who your speakers going to be,
the description is really important to get folks engaged in what you are offering,
and to really think about what's the webinar going to be about, who is the best suited for,
when you are going to offer at, and remember to be clear about time zones.
There are a lot of folks who I've seen not list their time zones.
And also, when you do list your time zones know that folks are still going to mess that up.
And one thing that I mentioned about the title earlier is that we originally called this
Behind the Scenes of TechSoup Talks. And I thought oh, that sounds really fun
and interesting. And of course, I know what TechSoup Talks is. I know that is a webinar,
and it means something to me that for folks who are more of a headline reader,
they are not going to go and look at the description and make sure that the headline
really tells people what the webinar is about. So we did see that there weren't as many people
signing up for the webinar as we would've hoped. So we went ahead and started promoting it again
under a different title calling it Step-By-Step to Producing a Webinar.
So we try and be nimble that way and roll with the punches in a way,
because we do want to get the word out. We think these webinars are important,
and if we are not marketing them properly then people are missing out.
So getting that description worked out is one of the first and most important things.
And creating the registration page, Shawn will be going through that.
Actually, why don't we just do that right now Shawn.
Shawn: Yeah, we can do that. And I am planning and demonstrating that.
Is that still okay Kami, in the time that we have?
Kami: Perfect.
Shawn: So what I will do is I'm going to come out to a browser
and I'm going to demonstrate live. I'm going to set up a registration right in front of everybody.
I won't go through my regular training, I will just talk about some high points
especially as it relates to scheduling, maybe some timing points to be thinking about,
and how to learn a little bit about your audience.
So let's move over there. And while I'm switching things, that description piece Kami,
that you just went through, it seems simple to title your presentation
and market the messaging appropriately, but it is so important.
And the best analogy that I can bring is that you do not want your webinar title
to sound like your company's mission statement,
because if anybody has ever read a mission statement it sounds like a whole bunch
of sentence fragments put together that doesn't make any sense. Like everybody went in a room,
they brainstormed, and they say yeah, this is our mission.
The same kind of thing happens with webinars, and it is just as long sentence
that means something to the people in the room, but just what Kami said,
make it make sense to your audience. Make it descriptive. Make it short.
And make it mean what it is all about.
So here we are at our ReadyTalk world and let's build this registration page.
So we will just start the process by scheduling this. And we will do some simple pieces like —
we will just do this.
Kami: And I want to stop for one second and just let people know that Shawn
is going to be plowing through this really quickly.
Shawn: Yeah, I will be.
Kami: And this is being recorded, so later if you want to go through and watch this again,
know that you will be able to pause it and play it and so have it as a reference later.
Shawn: Exactly right. You are exactly right. Well, let's set this up.
And so we put a quick title in here really basic, and then we will schedule the presentation.
From the matrix that you saw Kami pullout, I think that it's best to really start doing this a month
or more in advance. Now this piece of course can be done a little bit closer
when you are sending messaging. But the other things to be thinking about
would be may be some industry cycles. In some industries, or some worlds
you may work on a monthly or quarterly cycle. Be thinking about holidays, trade shows,
those types of things. So think about that as you are scheduling this.
I am just scheduling this, and I am going to make it a really goofy time here
so everyone knows it's not real. And as we schedule this piece out, of course,
make sure you have all the audio information and all the pieces
so people can listen as well. I'm just going to do this very quickly.
Now, in the ReadyTalk world, the way I am going to set this up is to ask people to pre-register,
because really this is going to give you the best information on the front end,
and it is going to allow you to if you need to, cater your value proposition
to your audience members. So let's ask people to preregister.
And we'll just go onto the next steps very quickly.
And as you go through these pieces on your registration page,
we are going to look at the registration form. Please, think seriously and creatively
about your registration questions. And this is information you are going to gather
from your audience before you have your meeting. It could be three weeks in advance.
It could be week in advance. But be thinking about this. So not only do you want to
grab some standard info from people may be like their phone number,
or the company they are from, but near the bottom I want you to be thinking about
these custom questions. And typically, what I see the categories of questions
doesn't have to be that specific. Some categories may be, what do you want to learn?
So that is one category. What are some things that you want to learn about.
And you can be specific. You can set up multiple-choice questions if you really want to track things
and make it easy to track. You can also talk about technology if you need to.
I know you are getting this e-mail, but do you have a phone, and do you have a computer?
Are you comfortable with this stuff? You can also get questions
from the audience to deliver during your presentation.
So I won't go through all of the examples, but those are things to be thinking about.
I'm just going to put, what's your favorite ski area.
Kami: And also, we've used it just to survey the people attending just to get an idea of information
about them. So if you are also wanting to find out a little bit more about your audience,
this is a good opportunity to do that, because they are required to answer those questions,
not necessarily that they are going to answer them correctly, but they do have to answer them.
Shawn: Exactly. And some of the things that I see happen when you put together
a good registration form — let's take a look at this while I'm talking. It's not very fancy.
I haven't put a lot of info in here, but this is an example. — Is often times
during this information gathering and the front end, people like Kami and I
will go back to our guest speaker and say, guest speaker! Guest speaker! Guess what?
We thought that our audience wanted to know X, but look at this feedback.
They really want to know Y. Are you comfortable with changing things a little bit?
And 10 times out of 10, if they know that subject they will be more than happy to do so.
Let's keep rolling here, a couple pieces of other things that I wanted to mention.
As you are building your webinar series — the emphasis is on "series" —
not only do you always want to be there, I want you to think about your branding elements.
So of course, whatever provider you use, try to put your logo in as many places as you can.
Make it recognizable. Put speaker information in there. Use the example
from your real estate friends. They have their faces on everything.
It's not because they want their faces on everything,
it's because you are going to be spending a couple hundred thousand dollars with these guys
or more. And then you say, oh, look at Kami. Doesn't she look trustworthy?
I think I will have Kami show me some houses or something like that.
Kami: Or show us some webinars.
Shawn: That's right, that's right. I am going to join, because she looks like she knows
what she's talking about.
Reminders are another good habit to get into. We are all very busy.
Please get in the habit of sending reminders however you do so.
The other piece I want to talk about on this registration is if you can,
and Kami, is it okay for us to talk a little bit about marketing campaigns?
Kami: Yes.
Shawn: Great. So again, without getting to far into how to use ReadyTalk,
I want you to be thinking about communicating and marketing your presentations
in any place possible where people might go. I'm sure you all have a website.
Don't limit yourself to placing registration opportunities only on the homepage.
Maybe they are several pages deep into your website where people may visit.
And if you don't know that, try it out.
So set up some unique campaigns. So one might be this. I just typed in homepage.
I'm going to do some other ideas with where the world is going.
[Shawn is filling in the "Campaign Name" form field; "Blog 1," "Blog 2," "Partner email list".]
Alright, so I am just going to give you some examples here. I did this very quickly.
All I really did is ask the service to generate some unique URLs so I can put them anywhere I want.
And by going through this process and for example, putting a link on your homepage,
the service is going to tell you how many times that link got clicked.
How many people registered from it. And at the end of your webinar
you can come back and see how many actual attendees actually showed up.
So as you go through this, you are going to be able to not only tweak your content,
pre-registration questions, learn about your audience, what's their level of expertise
and experience, but you also get a better handle on how to reach out to them.
Figure out what is working. Maybe Twitter doesn't work, who knows? Strike that from the mix.
And Kami, during our planning conversation we were talking about this.
Do I recall that you and I talked a little bit about some things that you switched
after learning the performance of some of your campaigns?
Kami: I love this feature. It really helped me figure out where my time was being spent best.
So my different out reach channels are, we do it in our blog, in our by the cup newsletter.
We send out messages to our partners to send it out to their affiliates.
So we have lots of different out reach channels that we use,
and I will name of the more in a second. But what I realized it is there were a couple
of online event tools that I was posting the webinars too, and they got zero hits,
absolutely no hits whatsoever. So I didn't need to spend a 15 minutes going to those sites
and posting it. That is what's going to help you use your time best.
And Shawn, if we could just pop back to — actually, wait. The reminder,
just to quickly talk about the reminder again, is that you guys all received a reminder yesterday
24 hours before this webinar. I didn't have to think about that. I just had to make sure to turn it on.
There is a lot of stuff within this registration tool that is really spectacular,
that allows you to set it up and then not think about it. So those are some great things.
And also, those are unique URLs that are created or any URL that's created for each webinar
will bring folks to the registration page before though webinar,
and will bring them to the page after the webinar if you have that feature set up.
So no matter if where those links are, people have them once they click on them.
Normally that would expire and would go to a blank page. It actually goes to the archive page
that you can customize. So I really appreciate that feature as well.
Shawn: Yeah, that is a really, really nice piece, because what we want to give you
is your own meeting space. And I try to draw analogies in some of my trainings too.
You want to try to replicate a live environment as best you can.
I mean, you can do a pretty good job, but there are some pieces that are missing.
So as you are going through that, think about somebody in California
and they didn't read their e-mail closely enough and they are three hours late
for your presentation which does happen. And you want to give them the value of that meeting.
You don't want them to try to log in and say sorry, meeting is over.
Provide that information. It is going to go a long way and be that organization.
Kami: So we are going to move on, because we are running a little bit behind.
I'll pop us back to the presentation. We are going to come back to ReadyTalk,
to the demo in a few minutes. But just to go through a few more of these points.
We mentioned the promotion, so I am just going to rattle off some other things
you guys can think about doing. Post it on your website, Twitter. Post it on Facebook,
in other people's newsletters. We actually have an RSS feed, TechSoup does.
So if you are offering webinars that you would like to promote to wider audience you can contact me
and I will give you information about that. If you are on any listservs,
it is great to promote it that way as well. So anywhere you can get your word out
for other events, use that for your webinars as well.
Reminder we talked about. Presentation, so we use Power Point.
We put our presentations together. That's a big part of the preparation
of the overall presentation. So that is a big, big deal.
And Shawn, I had asked a question yesterday. I don't know if you had a chance to answer it.
But what other options if people don't have Power Point,
what are the other options out there for creating presentations?
Shawn: I did see that. Well, there are other applications out there that exist
that allow you to produce these types of presentations. At the beginning point,
you must have some type of software that allows you to build slides.
Keynote is the Apple version of like Power Point. There is an open source version.
It is called Open Office. They have a presentation building, and that is actually free.
It is a free download. And you could utilize those as well. A presentation,
if it is going to be in slide format, it needs to be created somehow.
However, there are a lot of different options. You could show word documents.
You could show spreadsheets. You could turn things into PDFs that way.
Oh, thank you Becky with openoffice.org. I am a cheapskate, so I have that at home.
It works really well. It works really, really well. The important piece with our product
is that it gets saved in a Power Point file format. Even if you don't have it,
as long as you go to save as, and save it as a Power Point you will be able to put it in there.
Kami: Excellent. And then the outline/talking points, this is something that the process
has evolved for us on the back end. And what we make for ourselves as a guide
has turned into something fairly elaborate, but very helpful. And I literally have my talking points
here in front of me with the corresponding time. And we are actually like 10 minutes behind.
Oh well. But this really helps keep us on track. And also if there is any kind of technical difficulty
that you run into, and you start to get flustered, it is very important to have your notes nearby
so you know where you are at and what you are talking about. I have had several instances
where there has been some technical difficulty and really gets me flustered.
And if I don't have my talking points in front of me, I start to feel really lost.
And you go into that weird spiral that nobody wants to be in when they are presenting
in front of other people.
Shawn: Exactly. Don't ever let them see you sweat. It is just like you are on stage.
So if you feel like you made a mistake, don't draw attention to yourself.
Or if there are something going on, just roll through it,
and typically the audience will never know.
Kami: And we are going to be talking more about technical difficulties more in the next slide.
But the run through is an important thing to do before doing a webinar itself.
If you have speakers who are presenting, and they are needing to log in to your tool
and maybe they are going to drive and move the slides or show their desktop,
you need to make sure that their computers are compatible with the tool that you are using
and that they understand how to use it. Even if people say oh yeah, no problem.
I know how to do that. I have had two different instances where people were very cavalier
in that way, and when they got to log in they couldn't get their computer to work.
And it was 5 minutes before we were starting the webinar. And so was very frustrating both times
when that happened. So every time, I pretty much insist that there is a run through
that we go through. Do you have anything to add to that Shawn?
Shawn: I do, and it is only like the exclamation points that I put on the other end
of that run through. Do it! Do it! Do it! We all know the answer to this question.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice! Practice! Practice!
And I too, run into this all the time. I want to run throughs. I do that with one of my colleagues
in about three hours we are doing a full run through of an upcoming presentation.
I do this for living. I always go through a run through. Even if your customers, your speakers
say, hey, I've got it. I would say, practically force them to do it. The comfort level
and confidence with which they deliver the information and use the technology
is going to come through in the presentation. So do it! Do it! Do it!
Kami: Do it! Do it! Do it! And then you can go over the order of the content of the slides.
You can make sure that they understand how to login properly
and what time they need to be on the call. I always have folks get in
about 10 to 15 minutes early so we can do a sound check
and all that fun little banter that happens at the beginning.
So I am going to move on to what we are doing right now, producing it. And here is me,
this is in the other space that we were using for when we were doing webinars.
We have a dedicated space that was quiet. And we currently have a dedicated space that's quiet,
that I know I can plug into the network. I have a phone. I have my power cord.
Everything is ready for me to. Not that that is a necessity, it certainly helps.
Just make sure no matter what that it is quiet. You don't want to have fire trucks.
You don't want to have people clumping around and having arguments outside your office,
or whatever. So the equipment and the space is very important.
Make sure to login early. We always get started about a half-hour before
so that the screens are up for people when they come in. We call in about 15 minutes before
and we start talking so people know that it's happening.
When I say use a producer, we have somebody here that's taking care of stuff in the background
so I don't have to think about it. But Shawn does his own webinars.
I know Laura Quinn at Ideaware does her own. So it is not a necessity.
Don't make that be one of the things that stops you from moving forward.
And just following your outline and talking points, have that all prepared before hand
so you don't have to be concerned about well, am I talking too long,
or running out of time, or forgetting something.
And to take questions, so the thing that we do here as you are seeing is we take questions
on the chat. We either answer them immediately or we reserve them for the end.
And what Becky is doing is she just copies and pastes them into a Google Doc
and I log into the Google Doc as well. So when we get to our Q&A in a few minutes
I will be able to read those questions there, and ask them.
And the funny thing that we did originally when I started this year and a half ago,
is my coworker Chris was doing the producing part. And I am a little embarrassed to admit this,
but we were writing it down on a piece of paper. The questions that weren't answered
we were like scribbling them down. And I am like, we are both technically savvy people,
why didn't we think about doing Google Docs? We are so silly.
And the technical difficulties, no matter what tool you are using, something is going to happen.
Either your own computer is going to stop working, or the phones are going to go down,
or there is going to be a storm and there's not going to be electricity.
So just be prepared for those things to happen. And I guess you can't really be truly prepared
until it happens to you. But one time with ReadyTalk, I couldn't get the tool to open
and it took like 20 min. And finally it opened, but in the meantime I was sweating bullets.
I'm like, oh my goodness, I never sent out the Power Point before hand,
because honestly I never have time to finish it up a day in advance, and I am still working on it
in the morning. And I could have if I had sent it out earlier,
people could have gone to the presentation with me. And so there are just things to think about
ahead of time. And we have been lucky, knock on wood, that we've never had any speaker
bail on us or anything like that. But in the event of something like that happening,
just think about what would you do in case that happens.
And the one thing that I did do once which I will never do ever again
is forget to record the webinar. So I put a slide at the beginning to remember to remind me
to record. So if this is something that you know you are going to need later,
yes, remember to record.
Shawn: That is a good one.
Kami: And then to show you this is what we are looking at on our end.
There is a lot more stuff going on here. All of your names are here,
and the chat questions are happening down here. And we click on these buttons
to move the slides forward. And here are the little drawing tools that I am using
and Shawn is using to draw on. So it is really pretty straightforward.
And of course, each tool is a little bit different. But that is what ours looks like.
And Shawn does trainings on how to use all this. So if you are interested
in digging in a little bit deeper we'll be sending links to that afterwards.
Did you want to add something Shawn?
Shawn: I think you are on a great roll here. I am just nodding my head over here and going,
uh-huh, uh-huh. Yep, looks good. Just one quick know on these drawing tools.
I am having fun with this stuff, I mean, exclamation points and smiley faces.
But remember, you don't have any control over your audience members,
and you have a finite number of tools to use.
Kami mentioned one thing, audio, what you are saying, how you are saying it,
the speed at which you are talking, your inflection. But the other piece is what people are looking at.
Use these tools to share with people what's important, what you are talking about,
where you are on the slide. Because at the end of the day, you do not want them hunting around
on the screen to say, well where is dial? Where is the dial button? I don't know.
So use those tools to help bring some engagement with your audience.
Kami: And actually, if you move something on the screen the eyeballs will look at that,
and they also then will pay more attention to what they are hearing.
Because I am sure you have been on conference calls that you are not seeing anything.
You are kind of working on your own stuff, and you are not as engaged in the call
as you would be if you were actually looking at something. So that's another thing
that these webinars bring. Or if you want to do web conferencing that's what it brings
to the engagement of the audience.
Just to move on to the follow-up, what you will get after this webinar is a survey
that I have customized. And all of our surveys are pretty much exactly the same
so that we can compare our webinars apples to apples what people thought,
and get your comments and your feedback. But you can add any questions here that you want to.
And I am not sure if all tools are exactly the same, but this is something that ReadyTalk.
So the second we close the webinar, you are going to get the survey pop up immediately
and then we are able to send a follow-up message later.
But these questions that we ask like what did you think of the webinar, on a scale from 1 to 5,
what would you say? And I was going to have Shawn do another demonstration,
but it's actually not that different — sorry, much different than the preregistration.
It is all kind of set up in the same way. So just to give us a little more time to do questions,
we are not going to do that demonstration. But it is a great way just to capture what people
are thinking if they have suggestions for future webinars which is one of the questions I ask.
And what could we do better? So you are going to have to have a little bit of a tough skin.
We've had people say this was a complete waste of my time. This was a huge sales pitch.
The first half was really dull. Or your presenters, I couldn't understand your presenters.
Mostly, people say great things. And thankfully, I am happy about that.
But there have been a couple of comments that made me feel like, aw, that's too bad.
And I do take that and learn from it and make the webinars better because of it.
Shawn: A couple quick pieces on that follow-up, just like we talked about on the preregistration,
get to know your audience. Well, because you are doing this webinar series,
everything is going to be fairly fluid, and you are going to learn more about folks
from the front end. You are going to learn a little bit more on the back end.
And you are going to be able to cater. And again, back to that value proposition,
value, value, value. And if you think creatively about this — And Kami, I think you do a great job
with exactly what you are talking about here. How did we do?
What do you want to talk about next time? Were there any questions that went unanswered?
And I think those are great categories to go through,
so you can always improve on your web seminar series.
Kami: And in our case we have community forums where we encourage people
to post their questions so we can have them go there.
But know that there are going to be questions that people post in your survey,
and it is good to follow-up with them. It's time-consuming,
so I don't actually respond to questions. If someone puts a specific question
in the follow-up survey, I don't often answer it unless it is something that I can answer
really quickly, because I simply don't have the time. But we have an intern coming on
in a few months, soon hopefully, and we are hoping we can utilize that person
to do more engagement in the follow-up.
But after, in about an hour or two when I am able to pull all the links together,
you guys will all receive an e-mail from me which will include a link to the recording,
this Power Point presentation. I will even send you my notes outline
so you can see kind of what I was reading off of while we were going through this.
And I do download the audio file as well, so if you wanted to put this on your MP3 player
and listen to it, you could do that as well. So there is a way in the follow-up e-mail
to send up to five files as well as up to 1000 characters in a message.
And you send that out through ReadyTalk, and not through your e-mail.
So it streamlines everything and keeps it all in one place.
And lastly, just to think about how you are going to evaluate the success of your program
and tying it back to tracking your time, tracking the money you spent,
and figuring out was this a good return on my investment of time and money?
So what I wanted to do is just quickly talk about accessibility,
because this is something we had to deal with here.
What do you do if your audience is hearing-impaired and they can't hear
what you are saying? There was one thing that I did coordinate with one woman
who uses a relay service. In her instance she uses an online relay service.
If you just Google "online relay service," there are several to come up.
She uses Sprint. So that way she logs in to the webinar. She calls the Sprint relay service.
She then has somebody who is also logged into the webinar listening and typing
what that person hears. So that is one way that folks can be engaged in the webinar
if they are hearing-impaired. But we are also working on getting all of our recorded webinars
transcribed by using volunteers, and then flowing that transcription into the recording
so that there is close captioning. That is a very, very big project. I wouldn't encourage any of you
to embark upon it unless you have a lot of free time,
because it has kind of sucked the life out of me for the last couple of months.
But in the end we are going to have all of these webinars recorded and closed-captioned
on our site and accessible to everyone. So we are very happy about that.
And here is a quick screen grab of what it is going to look like when we get that up on our site,
and what the closed captioning will look like. We are keeping our fingers crossed
that everything works.
So what I want to do now — oh, go ahead Shawn.
Shawn: I was going to say, I want to talk to you about that when we are all done with this, okay?
Kami: Sounds great.
So we have had some questions coming through the chat. I'm sorry that we had to rush
through the end part here. But I am going to read some of these questions off,
and then we can see who would be the best person to answer them. Let's see.
Estimated number of hours for the planning stage?
Shawn: Ooo, wow.
Kami: You know, it's — I have that in the document somewhere. I probably should have put
that in there. That's a good suggestion. So for planning, I would say 8 to 10 hours.
Shawn: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Kami: Because planning means finding the speaker, coordinating their schedule.
And just that can suck an hour or two because you are going back and forth.
And for some webinars it has been like three hours of just trying to coordinate schedules.
But then the description, and getting the description approved
and putting it up on ReadyTalk, and plowing through the ReadyTalk registration pages
is super easy after you've done it a bunch of times. But the first time it is going to be an hour
or two. You're going to figure how everything is and where everything is, so you can expect 10.
But the more you do it the faster it gets. And if you are doing the same thing,
then it is going to be a lot last because you won't have that same kind of preparation every time.
You are just kind of re-doing it. So if I needed to do this webinar again,
I wouldn't be spending any time on the preparation.
I would just be spending time on the webinar itself.
What's that Shawn?
Shawn: Exactly, exactly right.
Kami: So another question is, do you recommend speakers being present in the room?
Shawn: Let me grab that one. Well, I recommend not being in the same room.
Now at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. But if you are in the same room,
if you have your two speakers, oftentimes you will have to be on a speaker phone.
Speaker phone technology has gotten better, but I will ask you this.
Kami, when you call somebody and they put you on speaker phone
what is the very first thing you say after you say hello?
Kami: Take me off of speaker.
Shawn: That is exactly right. You can hear that person, right? That sounds okay,
but you know you are on a speaker phone. So that is number one. The other thing you may run into if you have your
two speakers in one room and if they are both on hand sets or headsets with two phones,
you might get an echo because the one microphone might be picking u
from the other side of the room and you will get this strange echo.
When I do these presentations with my lead trainer, her name is Rachel,
we actually get in separate rooms. We are right next to each other but in separate rooms.
That will give the best audio quality.
Kami: And when we do it here, Becky and I are sitting next to each other
but we will mute ourselves. We'll look at each other and I'll mute mine when she talks,
and vice versa so we don't have that weird echo happen,
but we make sure to be very clear about that.
Here is a good question Shawn. Do you have any data around
who the average webinar participant is?
Shawn: The quick answer is no. But what you can do is — I know that's kind of a goofy answer.
It's different I would say for each webinar. And here is the beauty of what you have the power
to do. You get to actually define your audience is. That sounds kind of weird,
but you can. In the way you define who your audience is, is by putting the right topic
and description and content together.
The example might be if I were to put together a webinar and the title is,
Never Done a Webinar Before?: Everything You Need to Know but Were Afraid to Ask.
Well, I know at that point my audience is somebody who may be
a little bit technically challenged, a technophobe may be.
Maybe they are late adopters in whatever industry they are in. Maybe they are in a certain generation
that may be doesn't deal well with this kind of communication.
But because of how I have defined all this you get to define who your audience is.
Learn how to use pre-registration in ReadyTalk. Oh, now my audience is people
who know how to use the service. They want to get people to sign up first,
and then they want to go through all those pieces. So by doing things that way,
I've defined who the audience is. Does that make sense?
Kami: Yep. And I definitely learned a lot about the folks who register the questions
that you guys answered for this webinar. What industry are you working in?
What do you want to learn from this webinar? I think I asked you
what your computer skill level is? And that is very helpful depending on the webinar.
I mean, it's somewhat interesting for us at TechSoup to know, so that we can gauge
generally who our audience is, what their skill level is, what their budget size is.
And that's important information for us for funding and things like that.
One person, Kim asked, do you recommend having a behind the scenes person?
I personally love having Becky here answering questions and putting them in the Google Docs
and making it so that I can just talk and think about what the other presenter is saying
and respond, and just make sure I'm doing a good job as the main presenter.
But I know that Shawn does it all by himself. So Shawn, do you want to comment on that?
Shawn: Yeah, I was going to say, I do it all by myself all the time. But guess what?
This morning I did a training and I grabbed one of my account managers,
and said will you be my co-presenter? Will you do what Becky is doing right now?
And I would also recommend that when and if you can, it just makes life easier.
This conversational way to give a presentation and work back and forth, I think is more engaging.
But if you can, and somebody's got that skill level and you maybe have that chemistry built
with a team member, I would recommend that. I do them alone most of the time,
but whenever I can I grab one of my team members and say,
will you do this with me please?
Kami: And we have a couple other people here at TechSoup trained on how to do it,
and it doesn't take any time but the actual webinar. So Becky did help in this case
because she helps me normally with the webinars. But she would normally
not have to spend any time other than doing the co-producing part.
Another question, let's see, what are our thoughts on giving presenters the ability to drive the tool?
Do you think that in the case the chairperson should be the only driver?
I am perfectly happy letting other people drive if they know what they are doing.
The one thing if we are doing a software demonstration like Shawn was doing,
that folks not do certain things like if you are going to the Internet
and you are going to show a website, people have this weird tendency to role their mouse
up and down. So the websites go up and down and it keeps redrawing, and redrawing,
and redrawing and just turns the screen into a weird garbled mess.
So there are some things that you just have to then be more explicit about
when you are doing your run through. But to have them take that control
makes it a more engaging webinar. They'll think that they are a more engaging presenter
if they are moving the slides themselves. And I would definitely encourage that
to be what you use if you are able to do that.
I am going to be doing a webinar, or more of just a web conference,
and I will be producing it next week with someone who is calling in from Africa
and doesn't have broadband so they will just be calling in.
And they won't have access to the Internet at all. So we will have to be driving their slides for them,
and we will see how that goes. But I wouldn't recommend it.
Shawn: I think it will go well. In one quick tip on that, and this is just my personal opinion.
When you are pushing the slides for your speaker, one of my pet peeves
is having the speakers say things like "next slide please. Kami, Kami, move to the next slide."
Oh, that just rubs me the wrong way. So get in the habit of coaching with your speaker
and say something like, when you want to go to the next slide say something subtle like,
"as you can see on the next slide," or "as we move to the next slide we are going to illustrate."
And it is so much smoother. I feel like you are an elementary school at the filmstrip —
maybe I'm dating myself — and you hear BEEP, and it means you go to the next one.
So try to get out of that habit, even if it is just to make me not cringe in the background.
Kami: well, here is an interesting question, or kind of comment as well.
Can you do a hybrid training where some of your audience is face-to-face and some online?
I've never tried that. Shawn, have you?
Shawn: Oh yeah, absolutely. And whether we replace training with annual meeting
or internal meeting, those kind of things, you can absolutely do that.
Now the environment may be a consideration. It could be a training room
which might not be a bad idea so everybody gets there with the terminals
or maybe they bring their laptop in, maybe things are on an LCD screen and they are live,
or on a speakerphone. Then you also have remote folks dialed in and logged in as well
and you can all do it together. So the group that is live would be a consideration.
How many terminals? How is everybody going to see it? Do they have their own? Is it LCD,
that kind of thing. I do that quite a bit actually.
Kami: And I have heard that there are groups that will come together with their projector
and speakers and all watch it together which is great for us,
because they are only using one phone line. And we actually have a limit of 150 people
who can participate in any one webinar. So I love when I hear people doing that.
One last question, how do you track who uses your on line any time webinar?
So like I said we have these all recorded and available for folks to watch.
Another great aspect of ReadyTalk is a can track the number of the views to each recording.
You can require people to answer questions before they see the recording.
And normally I kept them open. So you clicked on it, and you are able to go to the recording
and just watch it. And we had a lot of hits through that. We changed it and
added a required registration, just putting in your name and your e-mail address
and we saw a huge drop in the number of people watching them.
So either the spybots were clicking on it, or the people just didn't want to give out their information
which I totally respect. So we have actually just recently changed it back
so you don't have to register at all. You just click and watch the recording,
because we are just testing it out to see if the numbers go back up again.
Shawn: I bet they will!
Kami: They will. So it's a great resource.
So some other great resources to go back to this list which again, I will send in the follow-up e-mail,
a couple of webinars that I have done in the past that are similar to this topic.
And the Producing Webinars for Nonprofits and Libraries is more of a high level overview.
It doesn't get into the real nitty-gritty that we got into today. And a couple of articles that we wrote,
as well as A Few Good Online Conferencing Tools was written by Ideaware,
and then the link to ReadyTalk's training page.
And to quickly tell you about the ReadyTalk Donation on TechSoup; it is $45 per year.
You have up to a certain number of participants that are free that you pay six cents per minute
per participant. All of these rules, this is taken directly off of the TechSoup site.
So sorry, that it is so text heavy, but we will include a link to this page in the follow-up e-mail.
And if you do have additional questions, I know I saw some additional questions
I didn't get to answer, and I apologize, but please do post those to our community forum
and we can answer it. I can answer it. Maybe if Shawn would be so kind as to check in
and answer those, that would be great as well.
Shawn: Oh yeah, I can try to check in, sure.
Kami: It's a great way if you haven't checked out our community forums,
there are lots of topics that you can post if you have questions
about your donor database program or your server, or any number of things.
It has volunteers watching those questions come through and posting answers.
So it is a great resource. And to tell you just a little bit more about some of the things that we offer
here at TechSoup, if you know us mainly for our donation program and our webinars,
we also have articles and a blog, and we have the community forums that I just mentioned,
as well as we do post information about upcoming events and conferences.
And we do have some webinars coming up. I will provide some information about these
in our follow-up e-mail. But next week on Thursday we will be talking
about event registration, specifically Activa which is one of our donor partners.
And then we have a series of Digital Storytelling webinars at the end of the month
beginning the two days kind of big event that we are having. So for those of you out there
interested in digital storytelling, how to create one, what the tools are,
we have a lot of resources then for you.
And I just want to close with a big huge thank you to ReadyTalk, and of course Shawn,
but ReadyTalk for providing this service, enabling us to offer this for free to nonprofits and libraries.
And ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada
reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration
through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services.
And information on how you can learn more about that.
And thank you to everyone for participating today and asking great questions,
and to Becky and to Shawn. And I hope you learned some great stuff.
Make sure to complete the postevent survey that will pop up as soon as we close this window.
And have a great day. Thanks Shawn. Thanks Becky.
Shawn: You are welcome, and thank you for inviting. So hopefully we will get to speak
with the group very shortly and it will be great to keep in touch with you again.
Kami: Excellent. Have a great day.
Shawn: Thanks. Bye-bye everyone.
Kami: Bye-bye.