 Welcome to Behind the Scenes, Running Webinars. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I will be your host and presenter today. And I will be joined by Ali Bestikian who is an Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup. And we will both be running the show on the back end, but we will also be doing it on the front end today which is a little bit of a rarity for us. We usually have guest presenters from other organizations or donor partners. You may also see Maria Niles in the chat window who is going to be helping us on the back end with any of your questions. So a little bit about us, I'll start with myself. I'm Becky and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here, and I've been with the organization a little over 6 years and started with the first webinar we did here more than 6 years ago. So I am happy to be your host for today. Prior to joining TechSoup in 2008, I spent a decade at three small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California where I was often the accidental techie. And I was also fortunate to be a beneficiary of TechSoup's donation programs and services and resources back then which is what led me to want to work here. And then also joining us is Ali Bestikian. So she is the Interactive Events and Video Producer here and the coordinator of our StoryMakers campaign which just wrapped up if you participated in that. She creates and directs videos and also helps run these webinars behind the scenes for us regularly. And you can follow her on Twitter at Ali Best. Ali, do you want to say anything else about yourself before we jump into the content? Hello everyone, thanks Becky. So as Becky mentioned, I'm the Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup. So that basically means I spend a lot of my time telling visual stories, something that we'll discuss a little bit about later on today. And I also assist our social media and online community programs here at TechSoup where I do work creating short videos on Vine and Instagram. Thanks Becky. Thanks Ali. And I mentioned that we have Maria Niles also joining on the back end and she is our social media manager. So she will be there to grab your questions and help you with any issues. We are all located right now in our San Francisco Headquarters office. And I would love it if you would take a moment and chat into us to let us know where you are joining from today. I have it pointing at the Bahamas because that's kind of where I always wish I was located. But go ahead and let us know if folks saying they are joining from Lafayette, Louisiana, Clifton, New Jersey, New Zealand, and you are up late early? I am not sure which. Boulder, Colorado, Oakland, California, Sacramento, Connecticut, Illinois, Wisconsin, Alaska, Philadelphia, too many places, even name. We are so glad to have you all with us. And we have around 150 people on the line right now. And I am sure that will continue to climb in the next few minutes while we get started. So before we dive into some of the meat of the content, here is a quick look at our agenda. And I will do a little bit of housekeeping stuff at the front end just so that we have everybody on the line when we get started with the best parts of today's webinar. I will do a quick introduction of TechSoup for those of you who may not be familiar. We will have a poll where we ask you to participate in how you currently participate in webinars or if you run them. We will do a quick history of our webinar program to give you an idea of where we have gained our expertise and learned those what not to do. And then we will talk about how to really plan a webinar program and run online events. And that will include the bigger goals and decisions that you need to make, how to plan each individual event, some best practices for creating great webinars, some wrap up things to do after the webinar because after today's event we are not quite done yet. There is still a lot of other things to continue doing. And then we will cover some webinar tools. There will be time for Q&A at the end. And as opportunities arise throughout the webinar we will try and take some questions here and there as well. So tell me, have you conducted a webinar before? Go ahead and click on what answer makes the most sense to you on the screen. Maybe you have done a lot of webinars and you are a pro and should be leading our next webinar on this topic. Maybe you have run a couple. Maybe you are planning to start them soon or perhaps you just attend a lot. Maybe you have never attended either and this is your first time. And if so, we are so glad to have you join us for your first time. So I am going to give just a moment so everybody has an opportunity to participate. Like I said we have around 150 people on. So I want to give everyone the opportunity to click on their screen on one of those radio buttons. And as it slows down here I will go ahead and show the results. It looks like about 46% don't run webinars and just attend them. That is great. We love that you attend webinars and we hope that you join us for some of ours whether beyond this one we offer them regularly. And around 21% are planning to start them soon. So this is great. You are in the right spot. For those of you who have done a couple, hopefully you will glean some insight into the way we run them that can help inform your own. Or maybe it will just reconfirm that you are doing it excellently. And then the folks who are doing many, feel free to chat into us because maybe we will want to talk to you and have you present on a future webinar with us. And for those of you who have never attended either, like I mentioned, we are really glad to have you join us for your first webinar. Hopefully it will be a good one. So looking at TechSoup Global, a quick introduction of who we are, we are a 501c3 nonprofit, and we are really a global network of 63 partner NGOs around the world that are working to provide technology resources in 121 countries. It's more than a half million organizations. So we do that in a variety of ways. This is our mission statement where we are working toward a time when every social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, resources, and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential. You can see where we are on the world and who we serve. Somebody just asked, what does NGO mean? That means Non-Governmental Organization. It's frequently used outside of the US to mean nonprofit. And in the US we typically go with nonprofit. So it's other social benefit organizations, public libraries, organizations that are doing things for the social good around the world. And we are happy and proud to be serving along with you. We have 79% of NGOs have improved their organizational efficiency with our resource offering. And so that may include the donation programs that we have distributed, more than $4.8 billion worth of donations of technology for greater good. It may include attending webinars and sharing knowledge and resources like today's event. It might be articles and blog posts and social media or live events or videos and trainings. We do all kinds of things. And this is just a quick look at our donation program. If you are not familiar with it, you can visit TechSoup.org if you are in the United States. If you are not in the United States you can visit our TechSoup Global.org website and find your local partner. So that's a little bit about who we are. And just to give you some backstory on our history of doing webinars, I started here in May 2008 and it just happened to be the first month we did a webinar. I was not the person who started it. This lady right here, Kami Griffith, started our webinar program six plus years ago. And it was originally a grant funded program that was a temporary limited thing to see how it went. And it took off and people have really enjoyed attending our webinars. After her, Kyla Hunt took over our program. And in the back end I've been helping all of those six years. So I'm happy to now be the webinar program manager. That's me right here. And this little face peeking out here is Ali, peeking in to act surprised during a webinar a few months back. And so we have been doing this for a long time now and have really learned all of the different things that can possibly happen have happened. And we've figured out ways to troubleshoot most of them. And either way you always go on with the show. And so in that six years we have served more than 37,300 attendees. So those are the individual people who have attended our webinars in that period. And so we've gotten to know a lot of you and we've archived more than 250 events on our website and YouTube channel from those. And so we do these just about every week. We have a webinar, not every every week, but most of the time we have at least one webinar a week. And 95% of our participants in last year's webinar said that they learned something new. So we consider that a pretty great benchmark for us to move up. And someday hopefully get closer to even 100%. And these are what our logos look like. We used to call it TechSoup Talks. So why do we do webinars? So I pulled out the section of our mission statement and highlighted here the technology resources and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential. And that's really what our webinar programs are intended to be about. And we do have this really broad reach. And so when we look at why we do webinars we do them knowing that we want to have large group workshops. And so we consider them lightweight meaning they don't always go really deep on a topic. They may not be a one-on-one training where you're in a room with only 10 other people. That might be something we do someday, but at this time we try to reach as many people as we can with our training. And so that's the reason and that's the methodology that we'll be looking at today. However, you may have come here hoping to do webinars for different groups and we'll cover some of that a little bit later. Also why we do them is that we have a terrific donation from ReadyTalk that has helped support our program from its beginnings. And so we're able to use this platform and we thank them for that because without it we would have to pay quite a bit to provide webinars to groups of this size and to 37,300 people over 6 years. We also do them to help promote the donation programs and services across TechSoup.org and our other global properties. So there's lots of reasons you might want to run webinars yourself. We do them to partner with the Foundation and corporate donors that we have these partners around the world that are real experts so we can bring Microsoft directly to you to answer your questions or we can bring Adobe to you to answer your questions. So we do it so that we can connect you with those people. We also regularly have nonprofit leaders and sharing their stories and experience with a specific tool or with a specific strategy to talk about what worked for them because we know that that often can help really resonate with your own circumstances depending on what they are. We do have this global reach so we try to make sure that we can make these available to everybody which is part of why we do them and record them and share them widely and invite you to share them too. We also do it to train people on how to get started with our programs so to demo the process of getting donations and things like that. So those are some of the reasons that we do them. Now I want to know why you want to do webinars and what kinds of events you want to do. So maybe you are looking to do it for different reasons than we are. And if there is a lot of you that are interested in a specific area, then I can speak a little bit more to that and it can help guide our conversation as we move forward. So go ahead and click on your screen and you can select as many as make sense to you. And if you are not sure the differences between some of these, I am happy to define them as I see them. So webinars are these sort of bigger events like what we are doing today, broader reach, bigger audience. Trainings might be a smaller group setting or classroom type setting. Daylong conferences would be online, multiple sessions, lots of different speakers. Maybe you are looking to use it to just train staff or volunteers or board members or have just online meetings so that you don't have to travel so far. Maybe all of the above. So I am going to go ahead and skip to the results here. I didn't put on here to make money. And I actually addressed this a little bit later in the presentation because we know that there are income opportunities as well. So that is one that you are looking for. Go ahead and chat into us because I do talk about it later on in the presentation. So I am going to give just another second since this is a select as many as you want opportunity and I want to make sure everyone can. So Glenn weighs in in the chat that we are a school district and would be cool to teach our students to do this. Jonah weighs in, yes, income. Angela weighs in audio programs so they would like to deliver audio only, so podcast maybe. So that is great. And I know you can't all see the chat comments that are coming in so if there are ones that we think are particularly of interest to you we will chat them back out to you. But we are catching all of those comments and seeing them. So Shirley weighs in that they are looking during the winter months when they have inclement weather that they would like to use these to supplement their board meetings so people don't have to go out. So I am going to go ahead and show these results. And it looks like around 68% of you are looking to provide trainings and not too far behind are just straight up webinars like this. And 56% are looking to do online meetings. So we will talk about kind of the different ways of doing those things. I am going to focus since we are talking about our webinar program and behind the scenes of it today. A lot of our content will focus on that but we will have opportunities to talk about these different ways of doing things and what tools may be most appropriate for the different options later on in the program. So why do webinars? So as many of you have already noted and weighed in that it gives you the ability to train from anywhere whether it is keeping you in when there is bad weather outside and you really all just live around the corner from one another or whether you are in New Zealand and somebody else is in Zimbabwe and you want to train together that it really provides you the opportunity to do both. Other benefits of doing webinars does let you travel less which can save you time, money, and save some wear and tear on our environment. So it is another great reason to look at webinars and online conferencing tools. You can reach large audiences. Now this one does depend on what kind of tool you use. Sometimes you are reaching large audiences that may not be the ones you want to reach. So you have to be very deliberate in how you plan your webinar strategy. And I do have a slide here on money. So I left this one at the end of the list because this is a why to do it and also a why to not do it because there are revenue opportunities with webinars. It just depends on what you are hoping to do with them. So for example if you, we use webinars once a quarter maybe to train people on how to use TechSoup.org's website, how to get registered, how to request donations, and that clearly shows people how to use the stuff that earns us some revenue. And so it is great for that. There are a lot of people that want to do webinars and sell them just for the content that is in the webinars. And while it is certainly possible to do that, it is a bit like being a consultant where you have to seek out those opportunities and build that audience and do some cost benefit analysis and market analysis of what the industry that you are in or what sector you are in will pay for a webinar in an event. And then you are also kind of up against the more rigorous standards that people who pay for something expect to get something very tangible out of it. So you need to really be clear on what are the benefits and takeaways that your audience is going to leave with at the end of the day. Are they going to have some worksheets that they can take back and improve a certain skill set? Are they just listening to you talk? Will they be happy with that if it is just that? So you really need to think about the revenue opportunity. Sure, it is there. Lots of sales companies, big corporations use webinars to demo their products and get people signed up for subscriptions or software programs, or whatever it may be. They will use it to sell, but it is because they have a product often outside of the webinar that they are selling to people. There are like I said people who can successfully make money off of just providing webinars that are rich in content. I would say it does take quite a bit of energy and time, and it helps if you are already a prominent name in your sector and in your industry that can really help you have a built-in audience. If you don't have an audience already charging for webinars, you may find that you only have a handful of people who show up. We have done some internal cost analysis on whether or not it is worth it to charge for some of our events, and the jury is still out on whether it would bring us revenue that would make up for the cost. So you really need to look at the cost of the service you are using, the cost of replacing any overhead, because doing an event in person may cost you some, but using a platform may cost you some. So I left money at the end of this because again it is a why to do it, and it is also a why not to do it, really depending on the circumstances. So I am going to move us forward on how to get started. So for those of you who are looking at beginning a webinar program or training program, starting with the end in mind is always the place, no matter what the project is, that you want to start. You really want to have a good handle on why are we doing this? What are the goals we are trying to reach? Here are some questions to really ask yourself when you are trying to get started. Are these our webinars, or online trainings, or online conferencing, are these the formats that are going to be right to meet those goals? So it takes looking at who you are trying to serve. If your audience is your board, for example, and your board members really hate doing conference calls right now, will they like it better doing conference calls that also include video? They may find it even more intimidating. So you really need to do that analysis for yourself and your own organization, and look at what those goals are. And then you need to figure out some of the logistical things. What tool will you use? So we are using ReadyTalk today. There are a lot of other tools out there, and new ones cropping up every day. And we will talk about some of them a little bit later. But some of them serve up to 10 people. So if you are looking to do an event with 50 people, that tool wouldn't work for you. So you have to really spend a little bit of time researching. And we will provide some more resources that can help you do those comparisons as well. But you really need to figure out what the tool is that is right for you. Who will organize and produce the events? Because like with any other event, whether it's a board meeting or a training that you might do in person, a webinar does require a good bit of time invested on the front end to make sure you are prepared for it to go successfully. So those considerations need to be there, and what the cost of those services will be, what the cost of that employee's time will be. So all of those things should be weighed and evaluated as you are getting started with deciding you want to move forward with some type of online training or webinar. So this is just, I will show a couple of different examples here of timelines. So when you have decided you want to go forward, and you have picked out some of those, you know what your goals are overall for the program. You know what, you want to get out of it. Then you need to figure out, okay, so we are selecting our topic. We are selecting our speakers or inviting our trainers. Maybe we are the trainers. So we are confirming with our stakeholders that that date and time works for them. If you have other people involved, you are setting expectations on what you are wanting them to deliver, if it's that they are going to build a presentation in PowerPoint, or that they are going to provide some worksheets or training materials that are very specific, that should be laid out up front. And so here at TechSoup what we do, we have a double-sided one pager that we give to all presenters when they first sign on to present a webinar with us. We don't pay our presenters here at TechSoup. They donate their time. And so we give out that one pager that just says, this isn't an opportunity for you to try and sell people stuff. This is an opportunity for you to educate people. Here are some tips and best practices. Here is the format that we expect from you and the timeline in which we expect the content to be delivered. So we have that kind of stuff laid out way ahead of time. And if you are planning a day-long conference where you may have six different workshops over the course of the day, then this four to six weeks really needs to be three to four months. And somebody just asked if we could share that one pager for speakers, and I would be happy to include it in the post-event email that you will get later today. And it is not really an agreement so much as it is tips that we share. We hope they read it. It has some legal disclaimers in there about whether they can have access to the list of participants and things like that. So we don't make that available. And so we try to, we don't give the list out to our presenters. We keep that in-house so we don't share your names. I think just to allay any fears of that. But this is the sort of timeline you are really looking at. And the logistics may look a little bit different for you than they do for us and for each event. But this is an example here. So two to three weeks before you want to be starting to create your PowerPoint. If you have a template that you are going to use because you are planning to do a series of events, you want to share that with your audience. You want to start your outreach. We found that doing outreach more than three weeks in advance, we have a much higher drop-off rate. So today's event for example, we had just about 300 people register. We typically expect to get 60%, maybe 70% on a good day who show up. And the industry standard they say is only around 40%. But if we started advertising the event a month and a half in advance, I bet we would be much lower with the turnaround rate. We'd have fewer people show up who registered that far in advance. So we want to make sure that we've confirmed that we have the PowerPoint in progress and a good draft of it for our run-through. We want to make sure we've got alternate call-in numbers for our presenters. So if their phone goes dead or we can't reach them on the morning of the event, then we've got another number we can call them at. Things like that just to make sure that you are preparing for the worst but expecting the best. One week before, we are looking at how many people have registered and maybe doing some additional outreach pushes to get people signed up. We do find that most of our participants sign up within a week of the event. So that's when we see the biggest uptick in registrants. We want to do our run-through at least a couple of days, maybe a few days ahead so that we have time to tweak anything and change the agenda a little bit, fill in any holes, cut stuff out. We finalize the materials and any handouts. We send out reminders so that our users know you've signed up for an event. Here's a reminder. Here at TechSoup, we send out a reminder the day before the webinar. We also send one out the morning of and we include the PowerPoint deck in that last reminder. Then after the webinar, we'll cover some of this later on, but we always have to thank our speakers if they are dedicating their time to our audience. We send a follow-up email. We gather all the metrics and data. We post it on our YouTube channel. We embed it on our website. We might have a recap post or create other content or video clips from that event. So lots of opportunities to take a one-time event and grow it into more content that you can share on your site and for your audience. And here's another look at a timeline. It's not so much a timeline as it is just a path of success that you're selecting your topics and learning objectives. So you could put times along with this arrow. And this is just another version of this that one of our other webinar program managers created previously, and I just decided to use it because I think it's nice to have a variety of different ways to look at this planning process. So when you're getting to the individual audience and that webinar, you really want to make sure you know what your audience is expecting. And you can do that in a variety of ways. So if you have a tool that allows you to collect registration details upfront and may allow you to customize questions, you can ask your audience, what do you most want to learn about this topic? You can ask them upfront and then weigh in. You can get that information if you don't already have it and it can help inform you. We also try to get to know our audience a little bit by having these interactive polls during the webinar so that we know what you're most interested in learning today. So this is where we define the topic, the purpose, the objectives. What do we want people to walk away having learned what those takeaways are? We develop that content. So again, this is a little bit of repetition from the prior two slides, but really just lists out those things you really want to consider no matter what kind of event you're doing. And somebody said they like the coin. My daughter is a scout, so we always are using scout analogies and metaphors in my day-to-day life. So I'll look at this in ReadyTalk because that's the platform we're on today. It doesn't matter so much what platform you use, but you do want to do some comparison of the different features. And so when I go to set up an event in ReadyTalk, you can see that it's just a basic form. This was for today's event. The title, I get to fill that in. I'm the host, my email address, daytime, all of that stuff. I get to write in the description and set up a toll-free number. Now when you're looking at tools, most tools if they're not internet-based audio like Skype where you're just talking to each other using the internet, if you're actually using phone lines, they may charge you long distance. So you need to look at that and determine whether you want your participants to have to pay a long distance charge in order to participate in your event. Or you may want to say to that company or provider, we don't want to charge long distance. What does it cost for us to provide the toll-free number for our participants? And get an estimate up front. If you think you're going to have 50 people ask them what do you think the charge will be? Is there an additional fee if we go over 150 people? Is there an operator needed? Do we have to pay an additional charge for that? If so, is it a per user, per minute fee? So those are things you want to really look at when you're researching your tool options. And here's a look at some more of this form so we use this broadcast audio so you can listen to it live streaming and we make that alternative phone number available to you. These do cost additional fees through ReadyTalk, but we feel that they are necessary to ensuring that all of our participants can be on the line and hear well and participate. And we can also provide additional services like for example, we can provide live closed captioning. If we have participants that need assistance or have audio issues, we can make that available to them through ReadyTalk. So if you are serving an audience where those kind of accommodations may be necessary, then make sure you're checking with your provider before you sign on with them. And just a couple of other quick looks at the sign up process and how you set it up on the back end. So we can add our own branding to the page. And so this allows us to register people. We can add our bios and speakers and photos. So that's just a little peek into what ReadyTalk looks like on the back end, but similar tools are out there that offer similar features and very similar setups. So it's not so much tied to the tool but things to consider when you're looking for your own. So I'm going to give my voice a break and have Ali come on and talk a little bit about some of the best practices for great webinars. And these are some of the things that we think really make webinars the good ones stand out. And so this is actually the sign on our door in the room that we're in right now that we post a sign letting people know that there's a webinar in progress and to quiet their voices as TechSoup has a couple hundred staff people running around our big building here and it could get awfully noisy. If we didn't let them know that, we want to make sure it's nice and clear for you. So I'm going to have Ali come on and talk for just a moment about what she thinks makes the best webinars. Yeah, thanks for handing me the mic, Becky. I wanted to jump in here because I think this is one of the most important pieces to think about when planning and engaging presentation. And that is visual storytelling. I appreciate taking the time to discuss visual elements in webinaring because I think that too often webinars these days can be really static. So the first thing that I think really makes a great webinar is that your presenters are interesting and happy and that they really set the tone for the entire event. So happiness is infectious and I think if you're bringing in presenters from outside which we often are, I often try and have, I always try and have a phone conversation with that person no matter where they're located to make sure that they don't talk like this because it's not so much about the personality but it's about the voice. You want to make sure that you can't see the people that are talking necessarily unless you're using video chat, but it really does help to have presenters that have interesting engaging voices. So bringing that happiness through really I think matters a lot. And Ali was just talking about visuals and that they're important. So we really think that you should embrace the visuals that if I had a quote from somebody just recently who said, if everything you're saying is already on the slide, then why are you there? And I would heartily agree with that. There are some parts of this presentation that I've bulleted out because I think they're useful checklists, but other than that we really want to make it engaging and interesting for you. And in addition to pictures, if you have a tool that allows you to use video or webcam, go for it. We're all getting our attention spans knocked down a little bit shorter these days where even a 6 second or 15 second video inserted into an hour long webinar can be really fun and engaging. I actually had a little clip from Instagram that I was going to play and it was just of me wrapping up a webinar a few months ago and then I thought that might be a little redundant since I'm doing the webinar. But we really like that there are so many visuals that can help display and communicate better than our voices even can. Another thing that really helps make them great is to tell stories. We try to tell stories and it really depends on the topic and the presenter, but anytime you can talk about what it means to you or what experience you have personally, it's going to resonate more with your audience than if you just read off a script. Nobody likes listening to somebody read off a script. And so I was listening to a webinar the other day and the presenter shared an example of thinking her daughter couldn't do something and that it would be too hard for her audience to do something. She conveyed the story of her daughter learning to use chopsticks at 3 years old and she thought, no way, she'll never learn how to use chopsticks herself. She can't do it. It's way too complicated for her. And she just let her do it and sure enough she was able to figure out how to use the chopsticks and now she's a 6 year old using chopsticks like an expert. So it's the kind of things like that where sharing those stories can really help. Yep, Steven recognized that story from Stephanie Girding who has presented webinars with TechSoup on and off for many years as well. And she's a great presenter that primarily presents within the library community. And if you get an opportunity to attend any of her events, they're really great. So I was just sharing her story and so it doesn't even have to be your own story to make it something that helps keep people's attention. So here are some, a little bullet list of some logistics for the day of the event. And somebody asked earlier, by day of what do you mean? And so on the day of the event we're in the lab at least 30 minutes ahead of time. We are often checking social media earlier in the morning. We're checking how many people are registered. We're making sure that that reminder email is either scheduled ahead of time or that it's being manually sent by somebody if you don't have the ability to schedule. We make sure that the equipment in the room that we're doing it is all functioning. So funnily enough everything worked fine earlier, but the phone just went down for some reason. So we make sure that we've got landlines and backup lines available. We make sure that we've got strong internet and a quiet room. That could be a conference room. It could be a hotel room. This little thing over here that I have a picture of is a Verizon Jetpack. It's just a 4G wireless hot spot, internet hot spot. And so even though I'm connected to our office internet, we had some broadband issues when we moved everybody into the same building. And we had issues where internet was cut out in the middle of a webinar and that's never cool. So we have backup internet available to us to make sure that we don't lose internet during a webinar or if we do that we come back up quickly. So like I said, we log on a half hour in advance and we call into the phone lines about 20 minutes ahead of time and we ask that all of our presenters do the same. We use a producer or chat assistant which is usually Allie's job. She helps with the chat. And today we have Maria helping with that as well. And that person is there to catch any questions about audio or any technical issues. For people who have a delay in the screen it might mean you need to call in by phone instead because your internet connection may be coming, feeding the different audio and video streams at different speeds. So things like that that person can help on the back end while the presenters are presenting because we can't always read the chat and present well at the same time. We do use headsets in our lab so that we can have hands-free to type. We have an outline ahead of time along with our talking points. And I actually write out an outline that has which slides will be covered and which time period. So I know when I need to be moving forward and I'm a little bit behind so I'm going to speed things up. And then we do record these events. We try to be prepared for technical issues but you can't always help that. Here's a picture of what it looks like. We're set up in the exact same positions today except you can't see it but Maria is sitting right here. Her ghost is right there. But everybody else, that's me. I'm in the same seat that I always am and I'm actually wearing a very similar shirt and that's Ali. And that's what our setup looks like. We hang right across from one another. And so when ReadyTalk is running on the back end this is what it looks like. So you can't see this. You just see that image that I showed at the very front end. But I see myself as the chairperson. And you don't see this because I didn't take a screenshot of it during a live webinar. But I see every one of your names listed in the big long list down here. And I see all of your comments coming in in this chat window. And I see questions that are being flagged in this tab and questions that I've answered being flagged over here. I see the slide that's on the screen right now. I see all of the other slides as thumbnails down at the bottom of my screen. And this is where I can insert polls or videos or other resources that I might want to share. This is where I can share my desktop. So if I wanted to show you the live Internet I could do that, I could grant control of my desk to someone else. And we could also enable webcams. And so ReadyTalk is pretty full featured. You won't find all of these features necessarily in a lot of tools that are out there. So this is what it looks like when I go to share my desktop. It lets me select the application or my desk. And this is what it looks like when there's a webcam. I took this screenshot in my bedroom in the wee hours last night so that's why it's so dark. But we could actually have a webcam playing and have our presenter's faces up on here. It's a little bit logistically more risky so we don't do the webcams as often because it really depends on the end user who's watching. It depends on their Internet speed. It can come up really choppy or broken looking, especially when we're doing things here and moving slides and using the chat. So we choose not to use it for our primary webinars. And no matter what, when it comes to webinars you've got to stay calm. Either way it's on with the show. And I like this cat image. It's okay if you forget the words so long as you members the jazz hands because it's always on with the show. We've got an audience and so we're going to continue moving forward even if things do go wrong. And here are some other things that are good tips for your presenters. Try to be your authentic self. Don't pretend. Don't read a script. Things like that. Really embracing flexibility. So if my phone line went down I would have reached over the desk and gently removed Allie's headset and taken it off of her head and taken it for myself. So things like that that we just have to be flexible and roll with the punches, have to have a sense of humor, do our best to engage our audience and try to consider your time and needs. So we try not to go over. We try to start on time. Things like that. Most importantly though, no matter what tool you're using, it's all about the people. It's not about the technology. The technology is just enabling us to connect but it's not what matters at the end of the day. You guys do. So post-event, once you have completed your webinar, yay, kudos all around. Anybody remember these kudos, candy bar, granola bar things? We loved those. But it's not done yet. So after we wrap up this webinar we will collect all of the assets meaning the recording, the PowerPoint deck, the links, any documents we said we'd share like that speaker handout. If there were any other worksheets or things like that we would share. We'd collect all of those. We would create our webinar archive. We would share it with you which we'll be doing later on today. The sooner after you share the better, the more likely you are to get more feedback on your webinar, more hazzaz as we say. And the more likely they are to actually use those resources. So we try to get it out within a couple of hours of wrapping up. It's totally acceptable to say we'll get it out to you within a day or we'll get it out to you within two days. I think if you go too much beyond a couple of days and a weekend passes, people forget. So it's best to try and get that out to your participants as soon as you can. And then you evaluate your performance. Share those results with your presenters so they can evaluate their performance. Learn and repeat. So those are big parts of this process. And here are a couple of screenshots of how it looks in ReadyTalk. This is the post-event survey page. This is what it looks like on the back end. So when we end this webinar today you'll pop out and you'll get this list of questions. And we can customize these to ask what we want. We keep some the same every time so that we've got a baseline to compare year over year and month over month so we know how well we do. Somebody asked, do you find that many people fill out the post-webinar surveys? We do, I'd say, on a good webinar. Usually about half of the people will fill out the survey. If they're really bad webinars we also will get a lot of people that fill them out. But if it's kind of just mediocre we will only get a handful. And that's never good. We don't want to have no feedback. So we want to have a statistically significant amount of people responding, 10% or more. And so I think our average is around 25%, 30%. And so we want to keep that. And like I said, the outliers on the high end we're always looking for. We do find that librarians tend to respond to surveys a lot more than everyone else. So thank you librarians. We love you for that. We get great feedback on how to improve. And here's a quick look at what that archive page looks like. This is from last week's webinar. So we send out just a quick archive that's in ReadyTalk that has all of these links, has the downloadable files, here's the presentation, PowerPoint slides, here's the MP3 file, here's the recording. So keep an eye on that because that's what it will look like later today when you receive it. On the back end it's just a form fill box that I'm filling in. You've got to pay attention to what options there are for archiving, and if there are any limitations. For example, this form fill, I can only put in 1,000 characters including spaces. So it does limit how much I can put there. I can add the recording and any files. So if you're looking to archive, you may want to make sure that you've got a tool that can do that for you. Or that at least lets you take it out and put it someplace else like on YouTube or somewhere else. And this is what the page looks like once our event has wrapped up. It's very similar to what our registration looked like. But now it shows me, I can look at these campaign URLs to see which links that we sent out and shared it in, got the most clicks and registrants so we can see what outlets for promoting our events were most effective. We can look at the archive page. We can look at the emails that we send to the people that attended and those that didn't attend but registered. We can look at all of the reports, how many people registered, what their registration info was. We can look at how many people participated in the poll, in the chat, in the survey results. So each of those are separate reports within ReadyTalk. It's very similar within other tools like WebEx and Citrix GoTo Webinar. It really just depends on the tool and the features. Again, this is a fairly robust tool. ReadyTalk also allows you to edit your recordings. So if we had something happen or somebody said something that was incorrect and we wanted to edit it out, we could go ahead and just edit it. It would let us do that right in here. I could just put the start time and end time that I want to cut out. I could just cut that chunk and save my recording and download it. Then I've got a whole list of all of these archives going back to, we have 189 in ReadyTalk right now because it doesn't keep them forever. So you should also ask how long does it keep them? So we are going to go into the tools and software and then I'm going to jump into Q&A. So tools and software, when you are evaluating the different tools that are out there, you really need to have those goals in mind. How many seats do you need? How many people are you serving? Are you looking at having meetings and trainings just with your board where it might be a group of 10? Are you looking to have a group of 150? The tool that you would choose for one is probably very different than the tool that you would use for another. So definitely pay attention to that. Which features are really must have? So maybe you don't need to have customizable registration forms. Maybe you don't need to have archivability on that tool. Maybe you just need to be able to take it out of the tool and put it on YouTube. So those are the things you really should look at what features are out there and which things you really, really need to determine what tool might fit you best. Do you primarily plan to use slides like what we are doing today? Maybe you want to share your screen primarily and not use a slide deck. So go to Webinar for example. It's screen sharing. So maybe you would have a PowerPoint but you wouldn't upload it into anything. You would just be sharing your desktop. Do you need to have webcams? Are you doing video? There are different options that are free. So you can find some free video conferencing tools out there where you can get online and Skype and have a Skype group chat. You can get online and have a Google Hangout with a group of people. It doesn't cost you anything. You can find low cost and then you can find more robust. And the robust ones really varies widely and often has different levels of feature sets that come at different price points. Do you need those toll free numbers, streaming audio, or long distance? Looking at those fee structures like I mentioned earlier, and really if you are looking for a webinar tool, search for webinar tools. If you are looking for video conferencing or online conferencing, sometimes they are the same feature, sometimes they are not. And LMS is a learning management system. If you are really looking to set up a classroom environment for people to share whiteboards and break off into little groups online, then you really are looking for a learning management system and should be searching that term. Most of these let you request a trial unless they have a free version that you can just download anytime. So I would recommend to do that and also to attend other people's webinars using those tools. So you can see an example of how it works in real time. And ask them questions. Most people who run webinars are happy to share. So here are some free and low cost conferencing tools. So for group video chat if you are looking just to have meetings where you are looking at each other's faces, these are some good options for that. So Skype, Microsoft's link, and this is actually included with Office 365 that you can get directly donated if you are an eligible nonprofit. And so this doesn't cost anything which is great. Google Hangouts can have up to 10 people interacting together using video. And UvU allows up to 12 for free. Now just remember with video conferencing it is still fairly new even though it has been around a couple of years at this point. And so plan on having some issues here and there. It may not be perfect. You might have audio that looks like broken up or video that feeds through a little bit differently or looks a little distorted at times. It is constantly improving but I wouldn't expect video to be perfect at this stage in technology because it just isn't quite there yet. If you are looking for application sharing and web meetings, join me. It is free up to 10 people and it starts at $159 a year for up to 250 participants. These ones I haven't listed out price points because they vary so, so widely. So ReadyTalk and Citrix are both available through TechSoup's donation programs and discount programs. We are using ReadyTalk 500 today and there are different options available. Citrix GoToMeeting is the one that is really for webinars. Sorry, GoToWebinar. I typed it wrong on there. I apologize. GoToWebinar is the one that allows you to have up to 1,000 people and that is a subscription based discount. You get a discount through TechSoup that discounts your annual subscription through them. GoToTraining is a similar discount program and it is really more for those small groups of 25 people or less doing classroom type trainings. So these are some other ones. Yugma, Big Blue Button. Big Blue Button is an open source tool that is out there. So it is actually free but it is just like with any open source thing you have to download and set it up yourself. So just be aware that you may need a little bit more developer help on that one. But there is a huge community of people using it that can help answer a lot of questions in their forums. Adobe Connect, this is on the more feature rich end for sure where you can have breakout groups and whiteboards and all kinds of really cool bells and whistles. Cisco's WebEx is another big top name in webinars and web conferencing. BrightTalk, similar. This one is also, this is really primarily seems to be used more as a marketing tool. So if you are looking just to market the work you do or the content that you create, BrightTalk is good for that sort of shallow, I don't mean shallow in an insulting way. I just mean it is sort of surface level, push it out to a big crowd but you don't get to go very deep with some of the bells and whistles. Fuse, another great huge tool that is really growing quickly. Moodle is a learning management system. So lots of these things, Blackboard Collaborate is also one that is used a lot in libraries and classrooms to teach. So this is more of a learning management system. Neuro is formerly called Watch It Too, and that is another video conferencing one that they are marketing more toward educators at this point. So some additional resources to look at for you. Here are some places where you can get those comparisons around different online conferencing tools. So this one we just recently updated on our site. It was written by Idealware. And then we've got these other tips for planning and conducting webinars, getting to know different online conferencing tools. And this was a webinar we performed previously. Audio and Video Conferencing Toolkit has a whole collection of resources. And this is a webinar that Stephanie Girding who I mentioned earlier who does our library webinars conducted with a coworker, training an invisible audience. So this one had a little bit more that was geared toward libraries, so if you are interested in that. And then 10 tips to monetize webinars. So for those of you who are looking to try and make income or earned revenue off of them, they give some tips in that article to help you figure out how to do that. So we are at Q&A time, so I'm going to jump into a bunch. Let's see, does TechSoup ever use webinar platforms that integrate collecting fees with being part of the webinar? ReadyTalk does not, which is part of Greg's question. And we have looked into this and have not found any really good solutions to a webinar platform that also processes payments. Most of them will let you register people, but I haven't found any that are really good at payment processing. So you usually would need to piggyback it with something like Eventbrite, or PayPal, or some other type of registration tool that lets you pay. And then they would get access to your event with a different link once they've paid for it. So Barb asks, what's your estimated prep time for a one-hour webinar like today's? Typically we say it's around 20 hours. And then the day of the event we have two or three staff people doing two or three hours of work each while the webinar is happening and a little bit beforehand and a little bit after. Deanna asks, do you record the webinars? Yes, we do record the webinars. And when we give information to our presenters about our webinars, she asks, do you have to have an agreement in that respect? There is no agreement with participants since you are all muted. But with our presenters we do let them know that they'll be recorded and that they'll be archived. We also let them know that we license our content as Creative Commons, meaning that it can be shared. So we try to make sure that they know that upfront and they're okay with it. If they're not, then we have that conversation and decide if they're not willing to share their slides. Maybe they just won't be able to present with us, or maybe we'll share them sort of in an exclusive way just with the people who registered and not more widely. So that's a little bit about how that process works. Let's see. Catherine asks, by sending the PowerPoint deck before the webinar occurs, don't you worry that by having the slides you are actually feeding your dropout rate? You know, I've thought about this a bunch of times, and we've found that people actually really like to look at the slides along with us. A lot of people like to take notes on the slides and physically have them printed out. So we think that's worth it. If it's helpful to that group of people that really appreciate it, we're happy to send it, even if it means fewer people might show up to the live event. Let's see. Dar asks, are webinars best for one-time events, or can they be used for educational sessions for five days a week? I mean, I think they certainly can be series. We do series of webinars here. I think for students you may want to make sure that they are following in a certain order, or that you have some ability to see that they've attended, if you have prerequisites, things like that. A lot of places offer continuing education credits, so they have to have attended and been there. And the one thing that's nice about having the ability to report afterwards is that you can see how long someone attended. So I can go back and look and say, oh, students, you were only here for two minutes. You logged in and logged right off, so that doesn't count. So you could use it in that way. So we are just about at the top of the hour, and I know we have a lot of other questions. So what I'll do is I will go through these within the next couple of days, and I will respond to them by email individually, since I won't have time to do it in today's webinar. So really quickly, as we wrap up here, I'd love it if you would go ahead and chat into me what one thing that you learned in today's webinar that you might try to implement. What's one thing that you think you could take away and do something real with? Whether you started a webinar program or not, maybe you just would implement it into your programs and presentations that you do live. So Veronica said she will tell more stories, not be on a script so much. Let's see what else. Download something and give it a try. Absolutely. Ask for a trial with webinar company. That's great. I'd like that you can use it for board meetings. Great. So lots of great ideas coming in, and we appreciate you taking the time to share those with us. Lastly, as we wrap up, I'd like to go ahead and invite you to join us for any of our upcoming webinars. I'm sorry you didn't get to hear more of Allie's voice today. She had a lot that she could have contributed, but we were down a phone line, so I appreciate you working with us on that and just listening to me. So next week we will be doing a webinar on tech tools for YMCA. So if you are with a YMCA, definitely join us for that to learn about donations that you can access. Then on the 19th we'll be doing a webinar on Every Kid Ready to Read, Tech Tools for Early Literacy. It will be targeting libraries but also organizations that work with children and early literacy. And then on the 20th you can join us to communicate and collaborate with Microsoft's link. So if you are interested in using that tool, do join us for that because you will get some more insight into that. You can also connect with us at TechSoup Global, TechSoup.org, on Facebook, or on Twitter. Lastly, thanks so much to Allie and Maria for their help on the back end. And thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing the use of the platform so that we can provide these webinars. Please, when your screen closes, take a moment to complete the post-event survey so that we can continue to improve our webinar programs. Thanks a lot, and I hope you all have a lot of luck with launching your own programs or improving the ones you already have. Thanks so much, and have a great day. Bye-bye.