The document discusses best practices for webinars based on the experiences of Amanda Schulze and Paul Dahl from the Council of Residential Specialists. It outlines that webinars should have clear learning objectives, engage participants through polls and discussions, and provide follow-up materials like recordings and assignments. Common webinar myths are debunked, such as the ideas that they are only for marketing or that no preparation is needed. The document also provides tips for promoting webinars through various social media channels and automated registration systems.
Welcome to Winning Webinar Experiences…what’s worked for us. We are here today to have a discussion with you about webinars and share what our association is doing to improve the learning experience surrounding webinars. We
Before we begin talking about webinars, we want to introduce ourselves. I am Amanda Schulze. I’m the Director of Distance Learning for the Council of Residential Specialists. I am also a student getting my doctorate in Learning Technologies from Pepperdine University. My studies are focused on using technology to improve the lives of women in developing countries. If you want to talk with me about that just let me know after this session. Paul, introduce yourself.
During the 45 minutes we have together we want to talk about: What we mean by webinars. Why our association is doing webinars. What’s working for us to create a webinar experience. Paul will tell us about some of the technology we use for our webinars.
Here are some of the defining characteristics I have listed for webinars. From the bullets here you can see that I am not referring to the technology (there are numerous platforms available) – a marketing session showing a product or service or trying to get people to buy something. We keep our sessions purely educational – this is what I am referring to. From the pre-session survey we know… QUESTION: How many of you are creating and executing these live events at this time within your organization? QUESTION: How many of you used to execute these events but don’t any longer? QUESTION: How many of you are thinking of doing webinars in the future?
First, we wanted to acknowledge and address any webinar rumors floating around out there. If you are in education, you’ve probably heard some of these. Have you ever heard that webinars… Only for marketing Can’t teach anything / Learn anything in 60 minutes Must be FREE! Recording is same as live Teaching F2F is = to webinar No prep time is needed / easy to execute Pack ‘em in! Have you heard these complaints or rumors? QUESTION: What other negative rumors or complaints have you heard or experienced with webinars?
Poll: Just like in a live webinar, we are going to ask you to polls! Here is the first poll. Our polls are anonymous online – so heads down or eyes closed!
Paul and I work for the Council of Residential Specialists – known as CRS. This is a real estate association that focuses on continuing education in real estate. In order to become Designated with our association agents must meet specific education requirements and complete a number of real estate transactions in a specific time frame. You cannot buy this Designation! It’s not easy to get and can take some agents years. Because our classes are decentralized, agents must travel to locations to take a classroom course but they can now also take a course online that counts toward getting this designation.
We started webinars conducting webinars over 3 years ago – in 2007 and we’ve learned a lot! But some of the reasons we started conducting these types of events may resonate with you as well. Our competition is expanding on a daily basis. There are only so many real estate agents and in terms of where they can go to get their education, is HUGE! There are online real estate schools, online universities, other real estate associations and designations. Not to mention a new conference every day and social media sites like Active Rain. We could fill this entire page.
In addition to competing with all those other organizations and associations on the previous slide, here are a few more reasons that webinars are still relevant in our organization. Once an agent enters our education path to get the Designation and gets designated they don’t return to our education. They don’t attend new classroom course or take online courses they simply maintain membership. How many of you know someone in their field that once he or she has the credentials they never return to school? This is the same. We need a way to deliver hot topics and educate our members on changes in the industry. And webinars are just one way to do this, but this was a quick delivery method we could offer. Our members are located all over the US and some outside the US, so coming together for education is challenging. We wanted to create a new revenue stream for our organization. We can keep costs down and charge a small fee, we come out ahead. We also have quite a few face-to-face classroom instructors that have a cult following. Webinars is another outlet to give our members access to their favorite instructors and for our instructors to stay visible. TRANSITION: So with this explanation of where the motivation came from for webinars, we can now share with you what’s working for us and if you could share what is working in your organization that would be great. Everything we share may not be applicable to all organizations so we want to get as many ideas as we can.
With our webinars, we do have goals – revenue and otherwise that we are trying to achieve. Achieve learning objectives – if we say they will be able to do X – make sure we teach them how! Generate revenue – we must bring in more money than we spend. So we have to cover all platform expenses, marketing, speaker fees, etc., We want to average around 200 participants – this means selecting topics that are current / relevant and speakers that will draw participants – they have to be willing to pay. We are getting better at extending the learning experience and providing support. QUESTION: How do we do this?
Poll: Just like in a live webinar, we are going to ask you to polls! Here is the first poll. Our polls are anonymous online – so heads down or eyes closed!
Part of our webinar experiences has to do with the webinar brand we have created. When you ask your attendees they should be able to describe your webinars or brand. You have to make sure that this is consistent for every webinar. Your brand may be “cheap” or it may be “quick tips in 10 minutes every Tuesday”. Or the “Learning Lunch Hour”. But think about how you want to brand your webinars and how they will be known. You don’t want them known for late starts, boring speakers, runs over, just a commercial, etc
As an example of blended learning, take a look at this model. For BEFORE: Their given content before the learning and even an assignment and link to a forum before they go into the course as an option. For AFTER: They get an email with tips and ideas extracted from the course a link to a wiki and forum to continue to add new content and another implementation piece – where they are asked to take the next step and implement what they learned.
This slide conveys how we create our webinar experience and live out our brand. If you download our slides, you’ll be able to study this diagram in detail. But as you can see – we focus a lot of attention before the live event and then after. This is a road map we use for marketing, for preparing the webinar participants to learn, how we interact during the session, and then what happens after the session. I am going to break down each part of the experience for you so you can learn how we achieve our goals. This is our dream checklist to accomplish all of this for every webinar. We can’t or don’t always, but it gives us something to strive for. We have systems in place for a lot of this and to achieve our goals – so anything we automate we do.
Sometimes we start with a great speaker and sometimes we start with a great topic. In our industry, there are industry leaders that have a lot to share and we want to tap into them and bring to our members. Other times we get requests or our trends team makes suggesstions. We attend conferences and want to bring those topics to members that cannot attend.
We have a formula for scheduling our webinars. You want to make this part of your brand so that your participants
You have the speaker, content, now you promote it! Don’t just tell them to go to this webinar, give them content! Did you know…come to this event and learn more! You have to give something away to earn trust. Something of value
Everything we are posting or dripping out send people to our website to register. We don’t send them to the platform but to our own site where we collect the money and send them an automated email confirmation. We don’t want them waiting or wondering if they paid and registered.
Provide sample
You don’t have to call it an assignment and we know that not everyone is going to do it – but put some thought into what your participants would benefit from in a pre-assignment.
This is given to the presenter the day before the webinar – because we have last minute sign-ups. Our report would include… Paul to summarize
Even our most experienced presenters we always do a practice. Test phones, Internet connection, review slides, poll Qs, Refer to HANDOUT
In addition, earlier this year we surveyed our CRS GRAP – Grass roots advisory panel – and with Trish’s assistance learned our members support us offering more delivery methods- give me choices! However, they want opportunities to network. Don’t take away their F2F classrooms or make them study alone online. They want to network and interact and share ideas. Are we providing this right now? In some ways yes, in others no. We can improve.
Now we’ve gone through several different components of the YOUniversity – what we have bow versus what we’ll have in the future. On this slide are some of the key tasks that need to be accomplished to get our vision for the YOUniversity up and running. The concept / idea has already been approved so that is checked off. Colleen’s going to talk about the Designation requirements as they pertain to some of these changes. Keith gave you can update on the website re-design. As we further define each of the pieces in the program – like coaching or mentoring or the partner programs, we’ll learn more about the requirements of each of these and what is needed to get them implemented. These are not going to happen all at once but will be done over time.