The Bamboo Project Blog

9 Lessons I Learned From Running My First Webinar

On Tuesday, I ran my first webinar--an hour-long session on time management. Not my topic of choice, but this was a long-time client so sometimes you do what you have to do.

After the webinar experience I liveblogged a few months ago, the one thing I KNEW couldn't happen with this thing was death by Powerpoint. You might be able to get away with a bad PPT presentation if you're an engaging speaker in a face-to-face situation, but not when the PowerPoint is all they see. There's a level of pressure here to make the visuals engaging that really forces you to step up your game.

Compounding my problem is that the audience I was presenting to is not, shall we say, the most technologically savvy crew, so I was also worried about the challenges of getting people online and participating.

Since this was my first time, I wanted to capture what I learned from the experience. I figured I should share, especially since others were so generous with their advice back when I asked for it in October.

Preparing

1. The time you usually take to prepare for a training session? Take that and quadruple it--at least. Part of my issue here may have been that I was doing a webinar on a topic that isn't second nature to me, so a larger than usual amount of prep time was devoted to figuring out content issues. But beyond that, the killer was thinking through how to make the presentation engaging when all people are doing is listening to my voice on the phone and watching me advance through slides. I cannot begin to communicate the agonizing over photos and slide transitions, etc. that I went through. Unbelievably time-consuming. Anyone who tells you that preparing for a webinar takes less time is either lying or isn't doing a very good job.

2. Err on the side of more slides. One thing I figured out relatively early on (thank God) was that I needed to be OK with having close to 100 slides. I've been moving in that direction anyway, thanks to Beyond Bullet Points, but I found this to be particularly important in this case because it gave a sense of movement and progress through the presentation that's necessary when there are no humans in front of you.

3. Write a script. My training style is generally facilitative and interactive--I've never been comfortable with the whole "sage on the stage" thing. One big downside of a webinar for 75 people, though, is that facilitation just isn't possible. You're forced into the position of "presenting"--the sort of digital equivalent of standing behind the podium and giving a speech. Because there was little interaction and no graceful way for me to jump around if I had to the way you can in face-to-face, I ended up writing a script for each slide--more like doing a screencast, really.

4. Practice, practice, practice. We used GotoWebinar, which for us worked pretty well, although we had a couple of glitches along the way. I wanted to be sure that I knew how to do everything, so I did a few practice sessions with some colleagues, including running through the two polls I included, so I could get comfortable with how everything worked. This wasn't just about flipping through slides. There was audience participation to monitor, questions to respond to (we used chat) and polls to conduct and review. It was a lot of stuff and I needed a lot of practice.

5. Be prepared for lots of technology confusion. When we sent out the invitations, we thought that we'd been clear about how to sign up for the webinar and made things pretty easy. We even had some less tech savvy people follow the instructions to make sure that we weren't being too complicated. Even so, we still had calls and emails from people who couldn't figure it out, so tech support was definitely an issue.

The Big Day

6. See Number 5. Yes, we had additional technology confusion on the day of the webinar--most notably, people not realizing that they needed to call for the audio and be online for the visual stuff, even though we emailed about this several times. But I had my own issues that I need to confess as well. Like forgetting to hit *1 to start the conference call. And forgetting to hide the poll results so that the audience could see the next slides. And advancing past the last slide so that people could be greeted with "end of slide show" and a black screen. You know. Stuff like that.

7. You need at least 2 people to answer the tech questions, neither of them being you, especially at the beginning. We thought that with the excellent (in our opinion) instructions we sent out about the call, we'd have minimal technology questions during the call. We had a couple of people standing by to answer them, but they were on the phone and had people on hold for 20 minutes into the webinar, so that wasn't enough. The biggest question was "Why can't I hear audio"? so we decided that for the next time, we're going to do a quick video demonstrating how you have to log into the webinar AND call the conference call number. Hopefully that will help alleviate some of the confusion. We'll also have a few more people to help out in the beginning.

8. Deviate from the script--and don't be afraid to make a few jokes. I had my script that I'd rehearsed with several times, but in the end, I used it as more of a guide, rather than as a strict script. I got more conversational and even made a few jokes, which is frankly kind of weird since it's like you're talking to yourself. But apparently they liked it, so I'm thinking that it worked.

9. Answering chat questions through audio is kind of strange. I broke a few times for questions that we encouraged people to submit though chat. I had to scroll through the questions to see what I had, while also not leaving a lot of dead air. So I'm scrolling, reading, chatting and trying to figure out the answers to the questions all at the same time. Not terribly difficult, but somehow I felt like a radio announcer on a call-in show. Strange.

Overall, the webinar went well. I got a lot of excellent feedback about the quality and the pace, so that was good. I think it helped that expectations were minimal--most hadn't done a webinar before and those who had had experienced government-run versions, which I don't need to tell you are the deadliest. I have to do another one on February 6, so I'm hoping it runs as smoothly. Of course, I haven't even started putting it together yet, so I guess I know what I'll be obsessing about for the next few weeks.

Photo via Sage

Webinar Round-Up: Results of Survey and Resources for Successful Webinars

A client of mine is wondering about people's experiences with webinars and how well they work as training tools, so last week I ran a reader survey to get your feedback.

Webinar Survey Results
Twelve people completed the full survey. Unfortunately another 27 started, but abandoned it, so my survey sample is pretty small. Nonetheless, I still wanted to share what they reported.

Participant Background
Participants were mostly split between business and nonprofits, with a few coming from the edublogging world. The majority (75%) had participated in more than 4 webinars, so this was a group that has had some experience.

Responses to Webinar Experiences
Most (54.55%)  thought that webinars are OK as a training medium, but they prefer face-to-face. I'm not sure if this is because they NEED face-to-face or because their experiences with webinars have been less than wonderful.

Thirty-three percent 33% said that webinars were an effective way for them to learn "sometimes," with another 25% indicating that it was "usually" a good way for them to learn.

The greatest webinar frustration was "lack of interactivity" (58.3%), followed by "quality of the content" (41.67%). A few had issues with the quality of the technology and the assistance they received in using it to access the webinar.

What They Like Most/Least About Webinars
For survey participants, the benefits of webinars included:

• Easy sign-up and participation.

• Reduced travel costs and the general convenience of not having to travel.

• That they are often free.

• That you can access people and contents that you might not otherwise be able to experience.

The downsides of webinars were:

• They usually consist of someone reading PowerPoint slides, which means that often, they are not engaging. As one respondent indicated, "Presenters seem to feel that because they aren't visible they don't need to prepare as much as they would for a face-to-face event, and they don't seem to adjust their delivery or content to fit the audio/web delivery method."

• It's too easy to multi-task and move on to other activities. 

• Few opportunities to ask questions or to interact with other participants.

The basic message I got was this: The things that make face-to-face events deadly dull seem to be amplified in the webinar world. This means you have to work even harder to keep online training sessions engaging and interesting for participants. Not that this is news, of course, but it underscored both my own experiences and what I've heard from others.

What Do Webinar Participants Want?
So what do webinar participants want from the experience?

It needs to be engaging. They want interactivity with both the presenter and each other. Ideally, they'd have photos of the other participants or some other way to be able to identify and "meet" who's there. At a minimum, they'd like to be able to "meet" the presenter.

They like polls and chat features, but they need to be used to foster a sense of connection to the presenter, to each other and to the content. They can't be used as gimmicks just because they are there.

This really isn't rocket science. What people like in their "in-person" events is what they they want to see in a webinar. This seems like it's easier said than done, though.

Resources for Making Your Webinars Better
One of my main reasons for taking a closer look at all of this is because I'm going to be running a few webinars in January and February and I'm looking for ways to improve the quality of that experience. As promised, here are some webinar resources that I'm finding helpful.

• Susan Smith Nash, the "E-Learning Queen" has some good ideas on how to improve the learning aspect of webinars. 

• From the National Corporation for National and Community Service, here's a great webinar planning checklist and set of tips. Scroll to the bottom for links to additional materials. Note that much of this is related to logistical and technological issues, but still useful.

• From Holly Ross of NTEN, came this link to a recent Discussion Group Summary on tips for running a successful webinar.

• A good TechSoup article on effective online training.

• Web Conferencing 101--12 great tips.

I'm looking for others, so please feel free to share with me any suggestions you have.

Some Additional Questions
As I'm delving more deeply into developing a webinar, I'm coming up with more questions/thoughts.

• Having never presented a webinar before, is there something I'm missing about how the technology works that makes it less effective to have interactivity? Is it because of the size of the groups? Is it the fact that you don't actually see people and have them to respond to, so you need to keep filling the space with your own voice?

• Why don't presenters make better use of the medium? Why aren't they using video to add to the message and break things up? Why don't they have more visuals, tell more stories?

• Why does every webinar I've ever participated in hold the questions until the end? Again, is there something about how the technology works that makes this necessary? Or is this just a hold-over from how so many trainers end up structuring their presentations.

I suspect that I won't get real answers to these questions until I actually run a webinar. I'd love to hear from presenters to get their side of the experience. If you've been a webinar presenter, how have you been able to make your webinars more engaging or interesting?

UPDATE--Be sure to read the comments section. Some great advice and resources from some experienced webinar presenters!

LiveBlogging a Webinar: Lessons Learned on Facilitating an Online Training Session From the Learner Perspective

This is me, liveblogging a webinar.  I'm not going to name names--just wanted to share the experience as it happens. More of a meta-analysis of the webinar experience with some commentary on content thrown in. I'm doing this to identify tips for when I'm presenting my first webinar in January. My lessons learned are at the bottom. Consider this another in a long line of process posts.

Before the Webinar
About 3 hours before we started, I got an email with links to handouts. Download page wasn't the most user-friendly thing. I could see where newbies would be in a "WTF?" kind of mode upon seeing it. I also personally think it was a mistake to send the slides before the session. I would have sent everything as follow-up, especially since the slides are already in the webinar and we aren't using the other info for this anyway. But that's just me.

Logging In
We're using Adobe Connect as the platform. Have to call in for the audio. I would appreciate better music while I wait--perhaps having different channels available to select? The easy-listening puts me in a bad mood before we even start.

We were supposed to start at 1 p.m. It's 5 after. That always annoys me, but at least with a webinar I can continue to work on other things while I'm waiting.

And We're Off!
OK--they've started--now they're giving an overview of the webinar room. They have a tech guy just for that, which is a good thing.

They're using one-way audio with the chat feature for questions/comments. Only the presenters can see our questions.

I wish that everyone could see what we asked This is one of the ways the presenters can control the conversation, by controlling what is asked. It's the illusion of interactivity, really. If they decide to not address a "difficult" question, then you don't even know it was asked, like you would in a real-life setting.

Now they're giving us an overview of the content. The audio isn't that great--very choppy-sounding. I'm on a landline so it should be better quality, IMO.

1:15--PPT slides are really text-heavy. I'm not surprised--that's the MO of this group. And the nice thing is that they're reading the slides for us WORD FOR WORD. That's always helpful for me. It's not like I could read it myself or anything.

Content Comment--People still need help on goal-setting and evaluating progress? Seriously? They haven't learned how to do this yet?

1:25: Ah. .  finally we have some graphics--incredibly tiny screenshots of a bunch of forms. You can't actually see them, but they are there. At least they aren't more text.

1:27: Hmm. . . they're still reading the slides to me. . . So far this webinar experience is very similar to the worst conference sessions I've attended--without the snacks that at least make it bearable. (Note to self--remember snacks for next time.)

1:28--Oh--good--a poll! That was fun. Lasted about 20 seconds. Now we're back to the talking.

1:30--Now we're switching speakers again (this is our 3rd so far). At least it's a different voice. Another person to comment on how exciting it is to be here, using this new technology.

1:33--Now she's reading a jargon-filled brochure to us. I'd rather read it myself.

1:35--More slide-reading.

1:37(Another content comment)--Lessons learned:

• situations evolve
• leadership and vision is key
• important but hard to stay on track
• need balance between clear project expectations and allowing flexibility
• Impact comes from applying what we learn.

Hmm. . . might these be the generic lessons of virtually every project I've ever worked on? Not very helpful.

1:43--Another poll! Seems like they're just doing it 1) to make us think that the webinar is interactive and 2) because they can.  Another 20 seconds of pretending that my input matters.

1:44--Another speaker. Another chance to be thanked for my participation and for using the tech.

1:49--No pictures at all in this thing. Tables, forms, bullet points, but no actual, useful pictures.

1:56--Oops--got a little more interested in looking at my feeds and stopped paying attention a few minutes ago. Must go back to webinar . . .

1:57--They'd better talk fast if they want to be finished by 2 p.m. so we have time for all the questions.

2 p.m.--I'm really not understanding why this couldn't have just been a tutorial they sent out to us. All they did was narrate the slides. Our presence in that moment wasn't really necessary.

2:02--OK, so now we're getting into questions. . . hmm. . . yes, "What is that URL again?" That's a good question.

2:09--Questions getting more interesting. . .Maybe we should have read the PPT slides and other materials ahead of time and then used this as a Q&A session only.

2:17--We're still doing questions.

2:20--And, we're done.

What Did I Learn?

• The technology worked pretty smoothly and that definitely made the experience better. That's a really key piece to running a webinar and I need to make sure that I have someone to handle those kinds of issues behind the scenes. Don't try to do the technology AND the presenting at the same time.

• I need to figure out how to make things more interactive and interesting for people--maybe more humor, more story-telling, etc. There's nothing deadlier than bad PowerPoint in a webinar. I didn't even have to pretend to listen. I could just go do something else. Great for me, but kind of defeats the purpose. You have to be REALLY dynamic and engaging to keep people from surfing while you're doing your webinar.

• Like the polls, but they need to maybe give more meaningful information that adds to the presentation and isn't a sort of lame bid for interactivity.

• Need to intersperse questions throughout--take periodic breaks to let people ask questions. Maybe allow them to even talk rather than just using chat.

• The slides need to be MUCH better. These were both ugly and boring.

Interesting experience to liveblog this. Made me much more aware of what was happening and my responses to it. It also made me really consider webinars from the user perspective.

Don't forget to fill out my webinar survey! I need your input!