How long does it take to organise a webinar? And, more to the point, can you do things well and still save time?
Can you create a rich, engaging experience while keeping time and costs under control? These are questions that occupy event organisers every day — we know, because we talk to you every day. That is why this time we want to give you our three best tips on how to do something that really matters: save time organising your next webinar.
1. Plan your webinar from the very start
Having a clear view of the webinar from A to Z is essential not only to keep everything under control, but also to run it well — knowing exactly where to step in if (or, more likely, when) something goes wrong — and to optimise activities and performance. All of this is often easier said than done, as anyone who organises events every day knows. Especially when delivering the experience you want to offer attendees means working across many different platforms: on one side the website that presents the event, promotes it and collects registrations, then the content delivery platform, which has to be set up and organised, then the newsletters to send out to encourage sign-ups, and the registrations to collect, store and manage so that they turn into unique access credentials, user profiles to personalise and differentiated access rights and permissions. And that is before we get to managing networking and social interaction, which are now essential parts of any event that really wants to produce results and be remembered.
As time goes on, as technology advances and attendees’ expectations rise, the number of functions, activities and operations to manage grows more complex, and being able to coordinate them and keep them under control with an overall view becomes more central. Only that can make the whole organisational and management process sustainable, in terms of resources, timescales and sanity alike.
2. Put yourself in a position to work in real time
When we are online we now expect everything to work and, when it does not, we expect support to be available and effective in real time, ready to solve any problem. Seen from the organiser’s side, that means having a hundred eyes — and as many hands — to be ready for every need. In the best case there will be nothing to fix and no emergencies, but if things go otherwise you will have put yourself in a position not to disappoint attendees and speakers, still less funders and clients.
How do you manage that? By creating a system that monitors and supervises every strategic component of the webinar, so that you have precise, real-time information and can guide whoever is struggling towards a solution.
And then, even leaving emergencies aside, think how important surveys and polls are at an event, how powerful they can be at producing genuine engagement or — conversely — what a resounding “flop” they can be when they fail to attract enough participation. Being ready to prompt people at the right moment, with the right message and through the right device (which may well be a smartphone, even when they are sitting in front of a PC) can make a real difference.
3. Build your future on experience
Anyone who organises events for a living, as you do, knows it well: there is no greater advantage than being able to base your work on experience. Being able to work with a track record of actions that worked and risks to avoid, ideally alongside the strategies for neutralising them, is invaluable. Since no sufficiently reliable crystal ball has yet come on the market, for many people in the events industry this often takes the form of an oral tradition: experiences, stories, accounts of successes and disasters, recommendations and advice. Highly effective, to be clear, but always tied to individuals who, as we know, can change job, role or even continent. Data does not move. Once collected — and provided it is stored and arranged so that it stays easy to consult and read — it becomes a solid base on which to build your future. It can be shared without fear of misunderstanding, it enriches field experience and gives it substance, and it is powerful enough, in some cases, to let you see the future coming.
And you do not even have to work hard to collect it: when events run on online platforms the data is produced automatically.
True, but do those platforms also collect it and make it readable for a human being, who is not a machine? Do they make it easy to consult, to act on and to pass on? Do they make it, in a word, a real working tool? Asking that question is what can make the real difference, and save a great deal of time and a great many headaches.
There they are, our three tips. Three suggestions that are also the three guiding lights behind the development of our own products. Because if there is one thing we have always been clear about, it is that, while we want to create events that people remember, we also want to make life genuinely simpler for event organisers so that they can spend their energy on the best part of the job: creating memorable experiences.
So how can we make your life simpler? Let us look at it together with a personalised session — request a live demo.