How to Run Great Webinars: Choosing the Right Platform

Wednesday, February 14, 2018 www.alastore.ala.org/elearning
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Welcome to How to
Run Great Webinars
Dan Freeman
Wednesday, February 14, 2018

• Director, ALA Publishing
eLearning Solutions
• Produced and facilitated
hundreds of webinars
• Holds an M.S. in Library and
Information Science
Dan Freeman

Poll
What is your level of experience with webinars?
• I have been a webinar instructor/facilitator.
• I have attended webinars.
• My institution does webinars, but I’ve never
attended.
• This is my first webinar.

Open Question: Please Answer in the Chat Space
What do you want to hear most about today?
• Producing a webinar (picking a platform,
getting prepared, etc)
• Doing a presentation
• Other…

Defining a Webinar
• Mirriam-Webster: “a live online educational
presentation during which participating
viewers can submit questions and
comments”
• Interactivity not limited to Q & A
• Purpose not limited to education
• Though events always occur live, recording
can be equally important

Why Webinars
• Webinars are convenient:
• Distance no longer a factor in
scheduling
• No travel time required=easier to
squeeze into tight schedules
• Those who like to be quiet in meetings
can do so without the fear of looking
bad
• Ability to record event; make it available
later

Why Webinars
• Webinars are affordable*:
• Cost of travel eliminated
• Many low-cost platforms; some free
platforms
• No printing, no paper
• You can speak to a big group without
the need for a big room and the
equipment it requires
*If your goals are more ambitious, cost can go up….we’ll get to that
soon.

Webinars vs. In-Person Events:
What do You Think?
•Better? Worse?
•Different? How?
•Pros? Cons?
•Please post your thoughts in the chat space!

Webinars vs. In-Person Events
• The Key Difference: They aren’t that different.
• The advantages and disadvantages of
each are minor and cancel each other
out.
• The disadvantages all have an
advantagous flip-side.
• Bottom Line: If you are comfortable in a
webinar format, you can teach and learn just
as effectively as you can in person.

Webinar Cons…and Pros
• Con: You aren’t staring out at the sea of
faces, so you don’t really know how engaged
your audience is.
• Pro: Less pressure
• Con: There is a camraderie factor with in-
person sessions that doesn’t exist online.
• Pro: People are there for the stated
purpose only; no side chat, fewer
distractions, more focus

Webinar Cons…and Pros
• Con: People are not as engaged with your
material because they don’t have physical
documents with them.
• Pro: That isn’t really true.
• Con: Some people are more comfortable
than others with the online format.
• Pro: For those people, there is an
additional layer of learning going on and
they are likely to leave more
comfortable than they came.

How to Choose a
Platform…

What do you want to accomplish
with your webinars?
• Just hold meetings?
• Teach to small groups?
• Teach to large groups?
• Hold events for your staff or consortial
members?
• Hold community-wide events?
• Start small with plans to expand into
something bigger?

You cannot choose a platform before you have a
clear idea of what you want to accomplish.
• Hold meetings, have focus groups, talk to everyone you can
talk to…
• Make sure all interested parties have all bought into:
• Size
• Scope
• Purpose
• Ambition
• Budget
• PUT IT IN WRITING!!

A Side Note…
• A lot of this stuff sounds obvious, but please
don’t discount it.
• Running a webinar includes lots of small but
crucial steps.
• Check out The Checklist Manifesto by Atul
Gawande.

How to Pick a Great Platform

Step 1: What features are essential to you?
• Capacity (more on this in a moment)
• Video with webcams neccesary?
• Is VoIP with headsets good enough, or do you need
for people to be able to call-in?
• Is it important to be able to load documents in
multiple formats (PDF, PPT, MS Word, etc)?
• Related: Do you need to impress the audience?
• Audience Interactivity Features
• Social Media?

Be sure to consider which features you want,
but do not need.

Step 2: Determine whether free is an option
• How big is your audience?
• If your audience is small enough for free
platforms, how likely is it to outgrow that
platform?
• Do the free platforms have the features you
need?
• How important is technical reliability?

How much do you need to impress your
audience?
• How big is your audience?
• Who are the people in your audience?
• How formal is your presentation?
• What’s the purpose?
• Teaching?
• Trying to justify funding?
• Just a meeting?

Consider a free-trial
• GoToMeeting
• Zoom
• Webex
• Adobe Connect
• Many others

Things to remember about free products
• Technical support is minimal at best, probably nonexistent.
• You might not have access to your recording…make sure to find out
in advance.
• If a for-profit company distributes a free product, the free product is
the lowest priority in terms of resources, bandwidth, etc.
• Free products are subject to disappear or completely change their
interface without any notice.
• This makes practice sessions even more important!
• You and your audience might be subject to promotions when using
free products—examine whether or not this is the case before using
them and weigh whether or not it matters.
• But most importantly…

Free products are a really good deal! If you
can use them, you should!
• There are a lot of free products that are
really good!
• If you are getting started with webinars and
you aren’t sure where your webinar program
is going, minimal commitment.
• Obvious benefit to your budget.
• You will look very smart to your boss or your
board or whoever you are trying to impress.
• If you are trying to justify funding, using a
free product underscores the worthiness of
your funding; shows you are anything but a
frivolous spender.

Exploring a couple of free
products:
This is not an exhaustive list.

Google Plus Hangouts
• Pros:
• Cutting edge; has tons of bells and whistles,
interface really impressive
• Technical reliability very solid for a free product;
backed by Google’s power
• Has pretty much every feature you can imagine:
Video, Screen Sharing, Chat, Ability to share
YouTube videos live

• Cons:
• Always a work in progress, so the
interface and features change
constantly.
• So many bells and whistles that there is
a bit of a learning curve, and all users
must have the same basic knowledge to
use…bad for low-tech users.
• You must join Google+ to use.

• The Hangouts-On-Air Feature
• Broadcast your hangout live on the web
so anyone can see.
• It appears like a YouTube video, you can
just embed it in your webpage.
• It gets instantly recorded and stored on
YouTube.
• Check out American Libraries Live.

• Bottom-line:
• Really good for small conferences.
• Really good for webcasts.
• Don’t use it if you need to assemble a
huge group.
• If you are using to impress someone,
make sure you have a really good
handle on the technology.
• Hangouts On-Air a really cool and
unique tool with incredible potential.

BigBlueButton
• An Open Source Tool
• Code is open—users can modify the
product itself
• 100% free (donations always suggested)
• Collaborative document editing,
whiteboard drawing

BigBlueButton
• Cons
• Constant changes, constant bugs
• Security concerns with open source
• No customer service

Step 3: If free isn’t an option, start exploring
fee-based products
• Start by asking how much you want to spend and
how much you’re willing to commit.
• Think about price in terms of capacity, because
that’s the first thing that’ll become a deal-breaker.
• Explore what’s out there; don’t limit yourself to
the big names.
• Wikiepedia has a great resource for features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web
_conferencing_software

Contact the Company to Schedule a Sales Pitch
• The sales pitch will allow you to see the
product in action.
• The sales pitch will allow you to ask
questions of the company reps.
• The sales pitch will give you the experience
of being a webinar attendee—it’s great
practice!

The Sales Pitch is Extremely Important
• It will probably be a pain to get everyone to
agree on timing, but it is well worth it.
• It’s more than due dilligence; it’s a neccesary
component of buying a product.
• It gives you the opportunity to get multiple
sets of eyes on the platforms.
• Equivalent of a test drive.

After the Sales Pitch…
• Get all stakeholders together for a
debriefing.
• Think of it like a focus group.
• (If applicable): Put it to a vote.
• No consensus? Get more sales pitches;
considering bringing in outside voices.
• Patrons Involved with the Library
• Faculty
• IT Staff
• Don’t rush it! You can get more sales pitches.

Once You’ve Made Your Decision…
• Start training; get as many staff members involved as possible.
• You can’t have too many staff members trained to run a webinar.
• Use the documentation and training provided by the platform—it’s
probably really good!
• Run as many mock sessions as you possibly can.
• If you can, run short mock sessions and run them frequently.

The Mock Session
• As you begin to experiment with your new
platform, the picture of your ideal session
will emerge.
• Document that and recreate it.
• Get as many people involved in the mock
sessions as you can.
• Have people participate in all roles—
presenter, attendee, host, etc.

Practice, Practice, Practice
• The technical aspect of running a webinar is always going to be a series of
many small steps.
• It’s not likely that any of these steps are going to be a huge challenge, but
there are going to be a lot of them and they will all be essential.
• You need to be able to complete these steps without thinking about it so
you can focus on your content, not the technical steps.
• Before you actually do a live session, you should practice enough that you
can launch and prepare the session without looking at a cheat sheet. That
being said…

Make Cheat Sheets!
• Having documentation is absolutely essential:
• It gives you a checklist of everything you
need to do to launch so you can think
about it less.
• It is a training tool so you can ensure that
others will be able to run an events.
• If there’s some emergency and an
untrained person must run the event, the
show can still go on.

Take Note of the Pre-Event Features
• Registration Page
• Registration form—what information do you want to collect?
• Reminder/Confirmation E-mails? Write a template.
• Register as an attendee to get the experience.

Take Note of the Post-Event Features
• Easy to ignore but important
• Does the platform give you the ability to send a follow-up email?
• Write a template for your follow-up e-mail.
• Is there a survey tool? If not, create an account at SurveyMonkey

Building Good Documentation
• Create the documentation with the person
who has no experience in mind.
• Use checklist format.
• Use screenshots when possible.

Running the Event: 1 Person or 2?
• The ideal way to do it: 1 Presenter, 1
“Producer”
• Producer is responsible for technical aspects:
• Launching event; ensuring all settings
are correct
• Handling audience techinical questions
• Troubleshooting

Develop a Plan for Tech Problems
• You need two types of tech problem plans:
• A plan for the common problems
individual attendees may experience.
• It may take some time to figure out
what these are.
• A plan for a major disaster.

Develop a Plan for End-User Problems
• It might take some time before you can figure out what the most common
problems are going to be, but you can get a good grip on that by running lots
of practice sessions.
• Write a script(s) that you can paste into chat. Here’s one of ours:
• Sorry you are having a problem with your audio. I'm assuming you are listening via the audio
broadcast. If your audio got interrupted, wait 10-15 seconds, and it should come back.
• Be prepared to deal with people who are angry/stressed/panicky.
• The best approach is a customer service approach, even though the people
attending probably aren’t customers.

Develop a Plan for the Disaster
• Disasters can take a lot of forms, but the
bottom line is that we’re talking about a
situtation where your event gets severely
disrupted or terminated.
• The first step in building a disaster plan is
accepting the possibility that this could
happen.
• You can mimimize the possibilty, but not
eliminate it.

• Before deciding what you will do, examine
what you can do:
• Does your platform give you a way to gather
the e-mail addresses of all participants? If so,
get that together as part of your preparation.
• If the event “dies”, can you quickly relaunch?
• Given the size of your group and significance
of your event, what’s the possibilty of
rescheduling?

• Develop template e-mails to send to
participants:
• We just crashed; please re-join.
• We will need to reschedule.
• Keep in mind that people are generally pretty
understanding when these technical
problems occur.

Questions?

Delivering an Awesome Presentation
• Our scope today is webinars for librarians.
• In your follow-up e-mail, you’ll get access
to Maurice Coleman’s webinar on
presentations (more general).

How Long Should Your Presentation Be?
• Ideal length of a webinar: 60-90 Minutes
• Not enough time to cover everything? Break
it into multiple sessions rather than stuffing
it all into one long session.
• Warning: If you make your session longer
than 90 minutes, people will disengage!

Start with a quick technical intro
• Spend 1-2 minutes going over the interface.
• Outline the most common technical
problems; how to troubleshoot and who to
ask for help.
• Include info on how to participate via
chat…not as obvious to some as to others.
• Explain the benefits of the webinar format
(recording, chat, Q and A, etc…)

Get Right to the “Meat” of Your Topic
• Avoid long preambles; introduce yourself and
your topic, then dive right in.
• This illustrates a key difference between in-
person and online presentations—there is
less socialization, people are there to get
down to business.
• Because you have less ability to charm
people than you do in person, you want
them to get their “money’s” worth.

Engaging a Webinar Audience
• Your ability to know that the audience is
engaged is different from what it is in-
person.
• Best strategy: assume they are engaged and
proceed accordingly.
• Keep in mind that every audience has its own
personality and the chat space is not
neccesarily an indicator of people’s
engagement.

• Get your audience involved from the start—
that means before the event even begins:
• Pre-event surveys/readings polls
• Opening the event with a poll or an
open-ended question
• Using the “warm-up” time to encourage
attendees to chat amongst themselves

• Always ask your audience about their level of
experience with your subject matter.
• This will get them talking, since they are
there to learn about this topic
regardless of experience.
• You need to know where they are
coming from; even tiny snippets of info
are valuable.

Build Interactivity Exercises and Tools into Your Event
• Polls
• Exercises
• Open-ended Questions

Break-Out Groups
• Consider the size of your audience
• Keep group activities manageable
• Remember: people are improvising

Avoid Silence
• Talk while people are engaging in an exercise
or filling out a poll.
• Don’t wait until everyone has submitted
their answers to comment; start right away.

• What are some methods you can think of for
getting the audience to interact?
•Post your thoughts in
the chat space

• Your attitude is key.
• Project confidence—audience will only think
your topic is as important as you do.

• Be prepared for engagement challenges.
• Consider “example” questions:
• “One concern many people often
express is…”

Always do Q and A
• Ideally, add a break for Q and A in the middle
of your event.
• Make sure you have a strategy for handling
questions beforehand (producer or no
producer).
• Keep an eye on the clock.

Social Media and Webinars
• Social media is ubiquitous, so you do want to
incorporate it.
• You can and should use your social media
channels to promote your webinars.

Create a Hashtag
• Or use an existing one.
• Create as far in advance as possible so you
can use it in promotions.
• Keep in mind that hashtags aren’t just for
Twitter anymore!

Give People an “Inside Look”
• Use social media to give background on your
presenter(s).
• Ask followers about what they are interested
in learning about the topic.
• Keep people in the loop as you prepare for
the event.

Keep Your Expectations Realistic
• You may not get much response; it’s hard to
know before you start posting.
• Make sure you look at your numbers!
• Even if numbers are low, you should keep
going.
• Small investment of time.
• Very good general practice.

Remember that You’re Talking to a Library Audience
• Use library-specific language and anecdotes,
even if your training is about something that
isn’t library related.
• Encourage the group to talk about their jobs.
Ask them where they work. What type of
library?
• Talk about your own library experience (as it
relates to the topic) as much as possible.

Remember that You’re Talking to a Library Audience
• Know your community!
• Who are you talking to? What do they want
to know?
• Think before.

The Visual Component of Your Presentation
• The visual component of a webinar is usually
a slide deck.
• This is much more important in a webinar
than an in-person presentation.
• Without slides, it’s just a voice.

Building Your Slides
• You don’t need design sense and you don’t
need artistic ability.
• Base your slides on your outline.
• Include images to keep it interesting (more
on this in a moment).

Building Your Slides
• While most webinar platforms will recognize
PDFs and Word Docs, it’s best to work in
PowerPoint because:
• PowerPoint is universal (more or less)
• It’s easy to export to other formats from
PowerPoint
• Stick with “common” fonts.

How Many Slides?
• The number of slides you use will vary
heavily depending on your presentation
style.
• A general guidelines is one slide per 90
seconds, but your results may vary!
• Think of your slides from an attendee
perspective—do you have enough to keep it
interesting?
• Using charts and graphs? Slow down!

Images on Your Slides
• Don’t go too text heavy—use images, even if
its just ClipArt.
• There are TONS of sources of free images on
the web:
• Wikimedia Commons
• FlickR (check CC license)
• OpenClipArt.com
• You don’t need to spend a ton of time
worrying about relevance, colors, etc.

Using Screen Sharing
• Use it; don’t abuse it.
• Great tool for demo’ing software, websites
• Not a great tool for sharing your slides
• Mind the lag!

ALWAYS do a Run-Through
• Too short? Not a big deal?
• Too long? Cut the fat!
• Cut your intro, cut your preamble, cut
audience interaction activities (but not
all of them)

Assessing Your Event
• Simple, easy and very helpful.
• Most platforms have built-in tools.
• Many free tools available; I recommend
Survey Monkey.
• Include a survey in your follow-up e-mail.

• Multiple choice questions:
• How useful was this event?
• How effective was the instructor?
• Open-Ended Questions:
• How could this event have been better?
• Were there areas not covered that you
felt should have been?

• Don’t take it personally! Remember, people
are anonymous, so they might be mean!
• Filter out the meanness and focus on the
actual substance behind it.
• If you are really sensitive, have a colleague
study the survey results and convey them to
you, but…
• Whatever you do, don’t ignore the survey!

Putting the Assessment Into Action
• When you view the survey results, try to jot
down immediate notes about how you can
translate them into actual change in your
presentation.
• Keep your notes with you when working on
revisions or a new presentation.

Closing Thoughts…
• Always wrap up with some closing thoughts.
• They don’t need to be profound; just avoid
the sudden ending.

My Closing Thoughts…
• Webinars are here to stay; the technology
will change.
• The ability to run a webinar is a marketable
skill that will only grow more important.
• You can teach/learn just as effectively online
as you can in person.

• Contact me anytime with questions,
comments, etc.
Dan Freeman
dfreeman@ala.org

How to Run Great Webinars: Choosing the Right Platform

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