 Conference is being recorded. Welcome. This is Behind the Scenes of TechSoup Talks. We are going to be going step by step to the process of producing a webinar. My name is Kami Griffiths, and I am joined by Sean Cardinal from ReadyTalk and my co-worker Becky Leighden from TechSoup. We are going to do some quick introductions. Sean, would you like to introduce yourself? I sure will. This is Sean Cardinal. I am the Training Director here at ReadyTalk which is a service everybody is joining on. I have been with the company since we were more of a small startup and had the opportunity to train hundreds, if not thousands of folks, not only to use the service, but also act as a coach for some of these larger type presentations. So what is a pleasure to be here. Thanks again for inviting me Kami. Thanks for joining. I really admire Sean's presentation style and have tried to not necessarily mimic because I have my own way of being, but to know that your audio is such an important part of the overall webinar and if you are really not very interesting sounding, then people aren't going to be paying attention to you as well as they would when you are engaging as Sean is. So I'd also like to introduce Becky Wiegand. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Thanks Kami. I am Becky Wiegand. I work here at TechSoup as a staff writer and I also help conduct and produce webinars. So you will see me mostly in the background listed as the chairperson on this webinar managing the chat and answering your questions. I'll also be taking those questions and holding them aside until the Q&O section at the end of the webinar so that your questions are fielded to primarily Sean and Kami who will be the featured speakers today. So thanks so much for having me on and feel free to talk to me about our chat. Great. Thanks Becky. Here's a quick rundown of what we are going to be covering today. I'm going to talk for just a couple of minutes about the history of our program here and why we got started and how we got started. And then a short bit about the pre-planning, the things you need to think about not spending a lot of time on that because we have some other webinars we've done that I can point you to. We're really spending the meat of the time talking about planning, preparation, producing, and then what you do after the webinar. So what I wanted to first do is the history. So we were grant funded a couple of years ago to offer some webinars. And we realized, okay, this is something that we have the capacity to do and we were funded to test it out. So we started offering these webinars. And since then, so about a year and a half now, we've offered 40. And we've made our mistakes along the way and learned how to do it a little bit better. And I feel like we're doing a pretty good job now. I'm happy to be sharing our lessons learned with you. Luckily for us, we have a partnership with ReadyTalk that allows us to offer these free to the community. So that's another reason why we're able to do this. And in the time that we've done this, nearly 10,000 people have registered for our webinars. So it's been a real treat for us to offer these to the community. And the things that you need to think about before you get started, ideally this webinar is for folks who have already decided webinars or something that they want to do. I'm not here to convince you that this is something that's for you that you're already kind of there. And you want to know, okay, how do I get started? But before you can get started really, there's some things you need to think about. So as far as the goal of the program, what are you hoping to accomplish? Is it a staff training? Are you doing another type of training for your constituents? Do you want a more engaging conference call, so web conferencing? Do you want to do outreach to your community or have a promotional campaign for some of the work that you're doing or to provide advocacy for a cause? So these are some of the goals that you might want to think about, as well as tracking the expenses and the staff time so that after you're done figure out, okay, was this worth the time that we put into it? So those are some things to think about as far as the goals. Now what tools to use? We're of course using ReadyTalk, but there's probably a dozen tools out there and they all have different things that offer different prices, different number of participants. They have lots of different qualities that you want to do some research on. An idea webinar with Laura Quinn about a year ago, Laura Quinn from Idealware, and we'll be sending you a link to this webinar as well as the article that she wrote that compares online conferencing tools. And this will be something that you'll want to do some research on if you haven't already settled on a tool. So some of the differences between the tools are the presenter, you could be videoed, and you could show that you're self-videoed. You could have more interaction between the participants. So I've been on a tool where it allowed breakout rooms, breakout chat rooms where the participants could chat with each other. There's a whiteboard feature in some tools where you can kind of like a meeting. You can have a whiteboard within a space and you could use that as participants to share information. And there's different ways for the participants to interact and use different tools. And the cost is different. So we're not going to go into great detail into that because we just don't have time. But there's a webinar out there that you can watch in an article to read. So I just want to do a quick question for everybody out there. I'd like you to raise your hand if you're currently offering webinars. So please just press the raise hand button if this is something that you're currently doing. Great, so I'd say about a quarter, a little over a quarter of you guys. And just so you know, we have about 50 people on right now. And so of those, if you could chat into me, what is the tool that you're using? Just to take a little gauge of... And as I'm coming in, Kami, one quick note. I really liked what you said about, hey, there are a lot of tools out there. And each one is going to offer something slightly different to differentiate themselves. So I would encourage everyone to really think about what we've got here. What is your goal? And what's going to be the best tool, the most reliable tool to get you there? And there will be some other things that you want to think about. But just make sure you think about what's most important to you. Sometimes you don't need the one that's gilded. Sometimes it's better to have something that maybe would serve your purpose just a little bit more tightly without all the bells and whistles. Excellent. Great point. So I'm just going to list off some of the tools that people on this call are using. We've got Wimba, which I've used before with... Oh, I see you Becky put it in the chat. Wimba that I've used for libraries, there's WebEx, there's GoToMeeting, and we'll follow up with some of these. But thank you for sharing that with us. And so next on to the next bullet, who will organize and produce the webinars that these are slightly time-consuming, and it will require some dedicated staff to be responsible for it. So for example, for us, we estimate it takes about 20 to 25 hours for us to organize each webinar. And I'll go into greater detail what those steps are. But that's a good chunk of time. In fact, it's pretty much my full-time job here is to organize the webinars with Becky's assistance. So that's something to take into consideration, and what is your capacity for doing outreach? And how many people do you want to serve? All the different parts of organizing the webinar would require a presenter and perhaps a producer, which we'll talk about more later, and someone to answer the questions on the chat like we have here with Becky. So those are the things to think about. Do you have a staff that can take care of that? And then the cost. The tools that are out there, there are some tools that offer some capabilities that are free, but they are very limited, so you do get what you pay for. And so this is something that you are serious about. Understand the cost and then budget for it so that you know that this is something that you can continue to offer. And Shawn, did you have anything you wanted to add? I did. On that cost side of things. And one thing you'll notice that I won't be doing today is trying to sell you guys on ReadyTalk, which isn't what I do anyway. But I want to alert you of some pitfalls. As you are doing your due diligence on this cost side of things, please check into those hidden costs. There may be some instances where you see on the front end where it's going to cost X, Y, or Z, or be free, but again, you get what you're paid for. And just be aware of that cost proposition. In some cases it may be very inexpensive on the audio side of things, but the quality may not be very good. So look at that balance as you are going through those, and be sure to ask those questions. Maybe see a sample invoice from, you know, maybe they can black out the customers and that kind of thing, but that might be a good exercise to go through as you are doing that. Great. Thanks Shawn. Now we are going to move on to the planning process. And this is, I would say, a big meaty part of it and the topic. So know that. I'm going to be speaking from the point of view of me and TechSoup and what we do here, but then adding in examples of other organizations, and Shawn will be adding in other organizations as well. So when you decide on, okay, what are we doing with this webinar? What's the topic going to be? After that you've determined what the topic is, what are you trying to accomplish? Is it a software training? For example, we've done a couple of trainings on the products that TechSoup offers through our donation program like Esri, the GIS program, and GrantStation, and four other product-based webinars where during the webinar we went in and showed the tool. In fact, Shawn will be doing that with ReadyTalk in a few minutes. So you could do a software training. You could just share information which is another thing that we do here at TechSoup is we pick a topic like the ROI of social media, which is one that we did just a few months or a month and a half ago. So we pick the topic and then once you pick the topic, then you have to figure out who the speaker is going to be. Some of the examples of the purpose of the webinar is to have a training or an idea, like a more in-depth training. And I've seen this happen well, and I've seen this happen really poorly, that it's very difficult to take to duplicate an in-person training on the Internet. There's no body language that you can see. It's difficult to get people to part or together and work on something. So it's like if you think of the in-person workshops you've been in, trying to make that happen on the Internet is a little challenging. But I wasn't one that had a tool that allowed people to kind of pair up and do some chatting that way. It was actually a pretty interesting way of going about it, but it really depends on the tool and how the tool allows the participants to engage with one another. And so I wanted to ask another question. Of those of you who are currently offering webinars, if you could just tell us what is the purpose of your current webinars that you're offering or web conferencing? And while we wait for those to come in on the chat, Sean, did you want to add something here? Sean I think on that topic and the purpose, we could probably do an entire webinar just on that one bullet. Some of the things that I've seen go correctly is when you have determined that topic, when people have really given it some thought they really think about the level of detail they need to go in. So they're thinking about their audience members and other things to think about. But be sure that on this topic and the purpose you're giving the value in the language that people need to hear, in the timing that people need to hear this as well. Sometimes if you have too broad of a subject, people may be walking around saying, tell me something I don't know. If it's too detailed, sometimes they get overwhelmed. So really think about what you want to get out of that, and then cater that topic and purpose. And maybe you have to do two webinars to cover it appropriately, but those would be things that I'd be thinking about on that side of things. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And as far as the last bullet, know your audience that if you know that your audience is the beginner level, then you can speak to them. If you know their advance, you can speak to them. And I think some of the issues we've had here at TechSoup is that we try to do something for everybody. And the comments that we then get is, this was too broad. This was way too much jargon, all in this response, all in the same webinar. So that's an important thing. So I'm just going to read out some of the things that people have put in here. Continuing education, meeting with people scattered all over the state, charter school information, training and orientation to electronic products to our client libraries, and a lot of online training for volunteers, and training and sharing of best practices. So we can see the training is definitely the overall favorite use of this. I have been on some that are kind of infomercial-ish, and they're interesting, but to get in there and just kind of dig deep into a topic, I find to be the most interesting ones not just to present, but also to listen in on. I was going to say on my side of the world, that's what I see as well. Training is probably the primary use for this type of tool, and that kind of information sharing. Great. So once you've picked your topic, then finding a speaker, if you're not the speaker, then who are you going to be here and available? So for example, when I picked the topic I thought instantly of Shawn, and contacted him immediately, made sure that he was available on the state, and then we had a planning call. So the trick is to try to schedule a speaker before you schedule the webinar, because we had a webinar scheduled once and a speaker fell through, had to find a speaker for that specific date, and it was a real challenge getting someone to fit into that. Make sure that that speaker is someone who is a good presenter, that they're not too fail-v-sounding. That's a problem I have here when we do product-based webinars that the presenters might sound like it's a big sales pitch and that really turns off the folks listening. Maybe somebody who is a really popular person that might draw more people to attend, definitely want a subject matter expert. And the great thing about it is that it doesn't matter where they're located. I've done webinars with people in other countries and it works perfectly fine. I'm just very excited about the option of having speakers that are in England for example. But the one thing also is try not to have too many speakers on at the same time. It's a lot to juggle. It's a lot of information to try to get into people's head in the short amount of time. And one webinar we did with five speakers just ended up being a bit of a circus. So that's one thing to take into consideration. And to talk a little bit about the format of the webinar, we often do our webinars in an interview type format like a radio interview where I will ask the presenter a series of predetermined questions and then they answer those with their corresponding slides. And we found that people really like that, that they don't then have to listen to the same person talk and talk and talk and talk. And it becomes more of a discussion and there's more chat questions that happen when we do it like that. But it's one way of doing it. You can have a presenter and we've done it all different formats. We've had presenters speak the entire time. We've had a panel where we have multiple people speaking. So to think about the format that you want to have it that you'd like to take it on. And again to close this slide talking about the audience, just knowing who you're trying to reach so that you can customize the slides and the messaging for them. And that's a piece that I'll talk on a little bit when I share with you how we set up our webinars this way and how you can really get into knowing your audience. And I think that's going to be a really valuable toolset, whatever platform you choose to use. I just want to take a minute and look at this slide. And this is something I developed here back about a year ago just to help me understand what needed to happen and when and who was involved where. So this is not going to be applicable for everyone because we're lucky that we are able to have a co-producer to help the producer. And so in this case, I'm technically the producer. I put together the description. I created the ReadyTalk pages. I did the outreach. I made all of this stuff happen. And in this case, Becky's the co-producer. So during the webinar she's typing a lot of things. She's fielding questions. She's dealing with any kind of issues that might be happening so that I can be talking and not have to worry about that. And I'll just solve the role of the speaker then making sure that I'm talking to them and that they know what the webinar is about and that they have the PowerPoint slides that they need to add. And that we do a run-through which we'll talk about the run-through more in a little bit. And so with anyone if there's additional folks on the chat who are answering questions, we've often had other experts just on the chat answering questions. And people like to have that added layer of assistance that in real time they can be listening, watching, and responding to chat. And some people don't like to have all that stuff going on. So again, it really depends on your audience. We'll keep moving because time is slipping by. And I wanted to talk about preparation. So once you've decided what your topic is, who your speaker is going to be, the description is really important to get folks engaged in what you're offering. And to really think about what the webinar is going to be about, who is it best suited for, when you're going to offer it. And remember to be clear about time zones. There's a lot of folks who I've seen not list their time zones. And also when you do list your time zones, know that folks are still going to mess that up. And one thing about the title that I mentioned earlier is that we originally called this behind the scenes of TechSoup Talks. And I thought, oh, that sounds really fun and interesting. And of course I know what TechSoup Talks is. I know that that is a webinar. And it means something to me that for folks who are more of a headline reader, they're not going to go and look at the description. So make sure that the headline, the headline really tells people what the webinar is about. So we did see that there were one as many people finding out for the webinars we would have hoped. So we went ahead and started promoting it again under a different title calling step-by-step to producing a webinar. So we try and be nimble that way and roll with the punches in a way because we do want to get the word out. We think that these webinars are important. And if we're not marketing them properly, then people are missing out. So getting that description worked out is one of the first and most important things. And then creating the registration page, Shawn will be going through that. Actually, why don't we just do that right now, Shawn? Shawn, we can do that. And I'm planning on demonstrating that. Is that still okay, Cammy, in the timing that we have? Great. So what I'll do is I'm going to come out to a browser. I'm going to demonstrate a live. I'm going to set up a registration right in front of everybody. I won't go through my regular training. I'll just talk about some high points, especially as it relates to scheduling, maybe some timing points to be thinking about, and how to learn a little bit about your audience. So let's move over there. And while I'm switching things, that description piece, Cammy, that you just went through, it seems simple to title your presentation and market the messaging appropriately. But it's so important. And the best analogy I can bring is that you do not want your webinar title to sound like your company's mission statement. Because if anybody's ever read a mission statement, it sounds like a whole bunch of sentence fragments put together that doesn't make any sense. Like everybody went in a room, they brainstormed, and said, yeah, this is our mission. The same kind of thing happens on webinars, and it's just this long sentence that means something to the people in the room. But just what Cammy said, make it make sense to your audience. Make it descriptive. Make it short, and make it mean what it's all about. So, sorry about that. So here we are at our ReadyTalk world, and let's build this registration page. So we'll just start the process by scheduling this. And we'll do some simple pieces like, let's just do this. And I want to stop for one second and just let people know that Sean's going to be plowing through this really quickly. And this is being recorded. So later if you want to go through and watch this again, know that you'll be able to pause it and play it, and so have it as a reference later. Exactly right. So let's set this up. So we put a quick title in here, really basic, and then we'll schedule the presentation. From the matrix that you saw Cammy pull out, I think that it's best to really start doing this a month or more in advance. Now this piece of course can be done a little bit closer when you're sending messaging. But the other things to be thinking about would be maybe some industry cycles. In some industries or some worlds you may work on a monthly or quarterly cycle. Be thinking about holidays, trade shows, those types of things. So think about that as you're scheduling this. I'm just scheduling this, and I'm going to make it a really goofy time here so we know it's not real. And as we schedule this piece out, of course make sure you have the audio information and all the pieces so people can listen as well. I'm just going to do this very quickly Now in the ReadyTalk world, the way I'm going to set this up is to ask people to pre-register because really this is going to give you the best information on the front end and it's going to allow you to, if you need to, cater your value proposition to your audience members. So let's ask people to pre-register. We'll just go on to the next steps very quickly. And as we go through these pieces on your registration page, we're going to look at the registration form. Please think seriously and creatively about your registration questions. And this is information you're going to gather from your audience before you have your meeting. It could be three weeks in advance. It could be a week in advance, but be thinking about this. So not only do you want to grab some standard info from people, maybe like their phone number, their company they're from, but near the bottom I want you to be thinking about these custom questions. And typically what I see, the categories of questions, you know it doesn't have to be that specific. Some categories might be what do you want to learn? So that's one category. What are some things you want to learn about? And you can be specific. You could set up multiple choice questions if you really want to track things and make it easy to track. You can also talk about technology if you need to. I know you're getting this email, but do you have a phone and do you have a computer? Are you comfortable with this stuff? You can also talk or get questions from the audience to deliver during your presentation. So I won't go through all the examples, but those are things to be thinking about. I'm just going to, what's your favorite ski area? I'm an old ski instructor, so I like that. And also we've used it just to survey the people attending just to get an idea of information about them. So if you're also wanting to find out a little bit more about your audience, this is a good opportunity to do that because they're required to answer those questions. Not necessarily that they're going to answer them correctly, but they do have to answer them. Exactly. And some of the things that I see happen when you put together a good registration form, let's take a look at this while I'm talking. It's not very fancy. I haven't put a lot of info in here, but this is an example. It's oftentimes during this information gathering in the front end, people like Kami and I will go back to our guest speaker and say, guest speaker, guess what? We thought that our audience wanted to know X, but look at this feedback. They really want to know why. Are you comfortable with changing things a little bit? And 10 times out of 10, if they know that subject, they will be more than happy to do so. Let's scroll in here. A couple pieces, sorry about that. Other things that I want to mention, as you're building your webinar series, the emphasis is on series. Not only do you want to always be there, I want you to think about your branding elements. So of course whatever provider you use, try to put your logo in as many places as you can, make it recognizable. Put speaker information in there. Use the example from your real estate friends. They have their faces on everything, as much as they want their faces on everything, because you're going to be spending a couple hundred thousand dollars with these guys or more. And then you say, oh, look at Kami. Doesn't she look trustworthy? I think I'll have Kami show me some houses or something like that. Or I'll show her some webinars. That's right. I'm going to join. She looks like she knows what she's talking about. Reminders are another good habit to get into. We're all very busy. Please get in the habit of sending reminders however you do so. The other piece I want to talk about on this registration is if you can, Kami, is it okay first to talk a little bit about marketing campaigns? Kami Yes, right on. Great. So again, without getting too far into how to use ReadyTalk, I want you to be thinking about communicating and marketing your presentations in any place possible where people might go. I'm sure you all have a website. Don't limit yourself to placing registration opportunities only on the home page. Maybe there are several pages deep into your website where people may visit. And if you don't know that, try it out. So set up some unique campaigns. So one might be this. I'll just type in home page. I'm going to do some other ideas with where the world is going. And like that. And I'm really going to do some... All right, so I'm just going to give some examples here. I did this very quickly. All I really did is ask the service to generate some unique URLs so I can put them anywhere I want. And by going through this process, and for example, putting a link on your home page, the service is going to tell you how many times that link got clicked, how many people registered from it, and at the end of your webinar, you can come back and see how many actual attendees you actually showed up. So if you go through this, you're going to be able to not only tweak your content, pre-registration questions, learn about your audience, what's their level of expertise and experience, but you'll also get a better handle on how to reach out to them. Figure out what's working. Maybe Twitter doesn't work. Who knows? Let's strike that from the mix. And Kami, during our planning conversation we were talking about this, do I recall that you and I talked a little bit about some things that you switched after learning the performance of some of your campaigns? I love this feature. It really helped me understand where my time was being spent best. So my different outreach channels are, we do it in our blog, in our Buy the Cut newsletter. We send out messages to our partners to send it out to their affiliates. So we have lots of different outreach channels that we use, and I'll name a few more in a second. But what I realized is there were a couple of online event tools that I was posting the webinars to and they got zero hits, absolutely no hits whatsoever. So I didn't need to spend that 15 minutes going to those sites and posting it. That's what's going to help you use your time best. And Sean, if we could just pop back to, and actually wait, the reminder, just to quickly talk about the reminder again is that you guys all received a reminder yesterday, 24 hours before this webinar. I didn't have to think about that. I just had to make sure to turn it on. There's a lot of stuff within this registration tour that's really spectacular that allows you to set it up and then not think about it. So those are some great things. And also those unique URLs that are created, or any URL that's created for each webinar will bring folks to the registration page before the webinar, and will bring it to the page after the webinar if you have that feature set up. So no matter where those links are, people will have them once they click on them. Normally that would expire and would go to a blank page. It actually goes to the archive page that you can customize. So I really appreciate that feature as well. That is a really, really nice piece because what we want to give you is your own meeting space. And I try to draw analogies in some of my trainings to you want to try to replicate a live environment as best you can. You can do a pretty good job, but there's some pieces that are missing. So as you're going through that, think about somebody well in California, and they didn't read their email closely enough, and they're three hours late for your presentation, which does happen. And you want to give them the value of that meeting. You don't want them to try to long and say, sorry, meeting's over. Provide that information. It's going to go a long way and be that organization. So we're going to move on because we're running a little bit behind. Let's just pop us back to the presentation. We're going to come back to ReadyTalk to the demo in a few minutes. But just to go through a few more of these points, we mentioned the promotion. So I'm just going to rattle off some other things that you guys can think about doing, post it on your website, Twitter, post it on Facebook, and other people's newsletters. We actually have an RSS feed TechSoup does. So if you're offering webinars that you'd like to promote to a wider audience, you can contact me and I'll give you information about that. If you're on any listserv, it's great to promote it that way as well. So anywhere you can get your word out for other events, use that for your webinars as well. A reminder, we talked about the presentation. So we use PowerPoint. We put our presentations together. That's a big part of the preparation of the overall presentation. So that's a big, big deal. And Sean, I had asked a question yesterday. I don't know if you had a chance to answer it, but what other options do people don't have PowerPoint? What are the other options out there for creating presentations? I did see that. Well, there are other applications out there that exist that allow you to produce these types of presentations. At the beginning point, you must have some type of software that allows you to build slides. Keynote is the Apple version of PowerPoint. There is an open source version. It's called OpenOffice. They have a presentation building. And that's actually free. It's a free download. And you could utilize those as well. Their presentation, if it's going to be in slide format, needs to be created somehow. However, there are a lot of different options. You could show Word documents. You could show spreadsheets. You could turn things into PDFs that way. Oh, thank you, Becky with openoffice.org. I'm a cheapskate, so I have that at home. It works really well. It works really, really well. The important piece with our product is that it gets saved in a PowerPoint file format. Even if you don't have it, as long as you go to Save As and save it as a PowerPoint, you'll be able to put it in there. Excellent. Then the outline talking points. This is something that the process has evolved for us on the back end. And what we make for ourselves as a guide has turned into something fairly elaborate but very helpful. And I literally have my talking points here in front of me with a corresponding time and we're actually like 10 minutes behind. Oh, well, those really help keep us on track. And also if there's any kind of technical difficulty that you run into and you start to get flustered, it's very important to have your notes nearby so that you know where you're at and what you're talking about. I've had several instances where there's been some technical difficulties and it really gets me flustered. And if I don't have my talking points in front of me, I start to feel really lost and you go into that weird spiral that nobody wants to be in when they're presenting in front of other people. Exactly. Don't ever let them see you sweat, just like you're on stage. So if you feel like you made a mistake, don't draw attention to yourself or if there's something going on, just roll through it and typically the audience will never know. We're going to be talking about technical difficulties more in the next slide. But the run through is an important thing to do before doing the webinar itself. If you have speakers who are presenting and they're needing to log into your tool and maybe they're going to drive and move the slides or show their desktop, you need to make sure that their computers are compatible with the tool that you're using and that they understand how to use it. Even if people say, oh yeah, no problem. I know how to do that. I've had two different instances where people were very cavalier in that way and then when they got to log in, they couldn't get their computer to work. And it was five minutes before we were starting the webinar and so it was very frustrating both times when that happened. So every time I pretty much insist that there's a run through that we go through. Do you have anything to add to that, Shawn? I do. And it's only the exclamation points that I put on the other end of that run through. Do it, do it, do it. We all know the answer to this question. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. And I too run into this all the time. I do run throughs. I'm doing that with one of my colleagues in about three hours. We're doing a full run through of an upcoming presentation. I do this for a living. I always go through a run through. Even if your customers, your speakers say, ah, I got it, almost, I would say practically force them to do it. The comfort level and confidence with which they deliver the information and use the technology is going to come through on the presentation. So do it, do it, do it, do it. Do it, do it, do it. Then you can go over the order, the content of the slides. You can make sure they understand how to log in properly and what time you need to be on the call. I always have folks get in about 10, 15 minutes early so we can do a sound check and all that fun little banter that happens at the beginning. So I'm going to move on to what we're doing right now, producing it. And here's me right here. This is the other space that we were using for when we were doing webinars. We had a dedicated space that was quiet, and we currently have a dedicated space. It's quiet that I know I can plug into the network. I have a phone. I have my power cord. Everything is ready for me to get. Not that that's a necessity. It certainly helps. Just make sure, no matter what, that it's quiet. You don't want to have fire trucks. You don't want to have people clomping around and having arguments outside your office or whatever. So the equipment and the space is very important. Make sure to log in early. We always get started about a half hour before so that the screens are up for people when they come in. We call in about 15 minutes before and we start talking so people know that it's happening. When I say use a producer, we have somebody here that's taking care of stuff in the background so I don't have to think about it. But Shawn does his own webinars. I know Laura Quinn at Idealware does her own. So it's not a necessity. Necessity don't make that be one of the things that stops you from moving forward. And just following your outline and talking points. Have that all prepared beforehand so that you don't have to be concerned about, well, am I talking too long or running out of time or forgetting something? And to take questions. So the thing that we do here as you're seeing is that we take questions on the chat. We either answer them immediately or we reserve them for the end. And what Becky is doing is she just copies and paste them into a Google Rock and I log into the Google Doc as well. So when we get to our Q&A in a few minutes I'll be able to read those questions there and ask them. And the funny thing that we did originally when I started this a year and a half ago is my co-worker Chris was doing the producing part. And I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but we were writing it down on a piece of paper. The questions that weren't answered, he was like scribbling them down. And I'm like, what's this? Technically savvy people. Why don't we think about doing Google Docs? We're so silly. And the technical difficulties, no matter what tool you're using, something's going to happen. Either your own computer is going to stop working or the phones are going to go down or there's going to be a storm and there's not going to be electricity. So just be prepared for those things to happen. And I guess you can't really be truly prepared until it happens to you. But one time with ReadyTalk I couldn't get the tour to open. It took like 20 minutes and finally it opened. But in the meantime I was sweating bullets. I'm like, oh my goodness, I never sent out the PowerPoint beforehand because honestly I never have time to finish it up at day in advance and I'm still working it in the morning. I could have, if I had sent it out earlier, people could have gone to the presentation with me. And so there's just things to think about ahead of time. And we've been lucky enough on Wood that we've never had any speaker bail on us or anything like that. But in the event of something like that happening, just think about what would you do in case that happens. And the one thing that I did do once, which I will never do ever again is forget to record the webinar. I put a slide at the beginning to remember to remind me to record. So this is something that you know you're going to need later. Yes, remember to record. And then to show you, this is what we're looking at on our end. I mean there's a lot of more stuff going on here. All of your names are here and the chat questions are happening down here. And we click on these buttons to move the slides forward. And here are the little drawing tools that I'm using and Sean's using to draw on. So the tool is pretty straightforward and of course each tool is a little bit different. But that's what I always look like. Sean does trainings on how to use all this so if you're interested in digging in a little bit deeper, we'll be sending links to that afterwards. Did you want to add something, Sean? I think you're on a great roll here. I'm nodding my head over here. Actually just one quick note on these drawing tools. Yeah, I'm having fun with this stuff. You know, exclamation points and smiley faces. But remember you don't have any control over your audience members and you have a finite number of tools to use. Can we mention one thing, audio, what you're saying, how you're saying it, the speed at which you're talking, your inflection. But the other piece is what people are looking at. Use these tools to share with people what's important, what you're talking about, where you are on the slide because at the end of the day you do not want them hunting around on the screen to say, well, where's Dial? Where's the Dial button? I don't know. So use those tools to help bring some engagement with your audience. I feel like if you move something on the screen, the eyeballs will look at that and they'll also then pay more attention to what they're hearing because I'm sure you've been on conference calls that you're not seeing anything. You're kind of working on your own stuff and you're not as engaged in the call as you would be if you were actually looking at something. So that's another thing that these webinars bring or if you want to do web conferencing, that's what it brings to the engagement of the audience. Just to move on to the follow-up, what you will get after this webinar is a survey that I've customized. And all of our surveys are pretty much exactly the same so that we can compare our webinars apples to apples, what people thought, and get your comments and your feedback. But you can add any questions here that you want to. And I'm not sure if our tools are exactly the same but this is something that ReadyTalk. So the second we close the webinar, you're going to get this survey pop up immediately. And then we are able to send a follow-up message later. But these questions that we ask like, what did you think of the webinar? On a scale from 1 to 5, what would you say? And I was going to have Sean do another demonstration but it's actually not that much different than the pre-registration. It's all kind of set up in the same way. So just to give us a little more time to do questions, we're not going to do that demonstration. But it's a great way just to capture what people are thinking if they have suggestions for future webinars which is one of the questions I ask. And what could we do better? So you're going to have to have a little bit of a tough skin. We've had people say, this was a complete waste of my time. This was a huge sales pitch. The first half was really dull. Or your presenters, I couldn't understand what you're presenting. Mostly people say great things thankfully. I'm happy about that. But there have been a couple of comments that made me feel like, oh, that's too bad. And I do take that and learn from it and make the webinars better because of it. A couple quick pieces on that follow-up. Just like we talked about in the pre-registration to get to know your audience. Well, because you're doing this webinar series, everything is going to be fairly fluid. And you're going to learn more about folks on the front end. You're going to learn a little bit more in the back end. And you're going to be able to cater. And again, it's back to that value proposition, value, value, value. And as you think creatively about this, and Kami, I think you do a great job with exactly what you're talking about here. How did we do? What do you want to talk about next time? Were there any questions that went unanswered? And I think those are great categories to go through so you can always improve on your Web Seminar series. Kami And in our case we have a community forum where we encourage people to post their questions so we can have them go there. But know that there's going to be questions that people post in your survey. And it's good to follow up with them. It's time consuming. So I don't actually respond to questions. If someone puts a specific question in the follow-up survey, I don't often answer it unless it's something that I can answer really quickly because I simply don't have the time. But we have an intern coming in a few months soon hopefully, and we're hoping that we can utilize that person to do more engagement in the follow-up. But after about an hour or two when I'm able to pull all the links together, you guys will all receive an email from me which will include a link to the recording, this PowerPoint presentation. I'll even send you my notes outline so you can see what I was reading off of while we were going through this. And I do download the audio file as well so that if you wanted to put this on your MP3 player and listen to it, you could do that as well. So there's a way to cap in the follow-up email to send up to five files as well as up to a thousand characters in a message. And you send that out through ReadyTalk, not through your email. So it streamlines everything that keeps it all in one place. And lastly just to think about how you're going to evaluate the success of your program and tying it back to tracking your time, tracking the money you spent and figuring out was this a good return on my investment of time and money. So what I wanted to do is just quickly talk about accessibility because this is something that we've had to deal with here. What do you do if your audience is hearing impaired and they can't hear what you're saying? There's one thing I did coordinate with one woman who uses a relay service. In her instance, she uses an online relay service. If you just Google online relay service, there's several that come up. She uses Sprint. So that way she logs into the webinar. She calls the Sprint relay service. She then has somebody who is also logged into the webinar listening and typing what that person hears. That's one way folks can be engaged in the webinar if they're hearing impaired. But we are also working on getting all of our recorded webinars transcribed by using volunteers and then flowing that transcription into the recording so that there's closed captioning. That's a very, very big project. I wouldn't encourage any of you to embark upon it unless you have a lot of free time because it's kind of sucked life out of me for the last couple of months. But in the end, we're going to have all of these webinars recorded and closed captioned on our site inaccessible to everyone. So we're very happy about that. And here's a quick screen grab of what it's going to look like when we get that up on our site and what those closed captioning will look like. Keeping our fingers crossed that everything works. So what I want to do now, go ahead. I want to talk to you about that when we're all done with this, okay? Sounds great. So we've had some questions coming through the chat. Sorry that we had to rush through the end part here, but I'm going to read some of these questions off and then we can see who would be the best person to answer them. Let's see. Estimated number of hours for the planning stage. I have that in the document somewhere. I probably should have put that in there. That's a good suggestion. So for planning, I would say 8 to 10 hours. That sounds about right. Because the planning means finding the speaker, coordinating their schedule, and just that could suck an hour or two because you're going back and forth. And there are some webinars that have been like 3 hours of just trying to coordinate schedules, but then the description and getting the description approved and putting it up in ReadyTalk. And probably through the ReadyTalk registration pages is super easy after you've done it a bunch of times. But the first time it's going to be an hour or two of figuring out how everything is and where everything is. So you can expect 10. But the more you do it, the faster it gets. And if you're doing the same thing, then it's going to be a lot less because you won't have that same kind of preparation every time you're just kind of redoing it. So if I needed to do this webinar again, I wouldn't be spending any time on the preparation. I would just be spending time on the actual webinar itself. So I'm just going to ask, what's that turn? That's exactly right. So another question is, do you recommend speakers being present in the room? Let me grab that one. I recommend not being in the same room. Now at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. But if you're in the same room if you have your two speakers, oftentimes you'll have to be on a speakerphone. Speakerphone technology has gotten better. But I'll ask you this, Kami. Kami, when you call somebody and they put you on speakerphone, what is the very first thing you say after you say hello? Take me off the speaker. That's exactly right. You can hear that person, right? It sounds okay. You know you're on a speakerphone. So that's number one. The other thing you may run into if you have your two speakers in one room, and if they're both on hand sets or headsets with two phones, you might get an echo because the one microphone might be picking up from the other side of the room and you'll get this strange echo. When I do these presentations with my lead trainer, named Rachel, we actually get in separate rooms. We're right next to each other but in separate rooms. That will give the best audio quality. And when we do it here, Becky and I are sitting next to each other but we'll mute ourselves. We'll look at each other and I'll mute mine when she talks and vice versa. So we don't have that weird echo happen but we make sure to be very clear about that. So here's a good question, Sean. Do you have any data around who the average webinar participant is? The quick answer is no. But what you can do – I know that's kind of a goofy answer. It's different, I would say, for each webinar. And here's the beauty of what you have the power to do. You get to actually define who your audience is. That sounds kind of weird but you can. And the way you define who your audience is is by putting the right topic and description and content together. The example might be if I were to put together a webinar and the title is Never Done a Webinar Before? Everything you need to know but we're for you to ask. Well, I know at that point my audience is somebody who may be a little bit technically challenged, a technophobe maybe. Maybe they're late adopters in whatever industry they're in. Maybe they're in a certain generation that maybe doesn't deal well with this kind of communication. But because of how I've defined all this you get to define who your audience is. Learn how to use pre-registration and ready-talk. Oh, now my audience is people who know how to use the service. They want to get people to sign up first and then they want to go throw those pieces. So by doing things that way I've defined who the audience is. Didn't that make sense? Yes. And I definitely learned a lot about the folks who registered. The questions that you guys asked or answered for this webinar, what industry are you working in? What do you want to learn from this webinar? I think I asked you what your computer skill level is, and that's very helpful depending on the webinar. I mean, somewhat it's interesting for us at TechSoup to know so that we can engage generally who our audience is, what their skill level is, what their budget size is, and that's important information for us for funding and things like that. One person, Kim asked, do you recommend having a behind-the-scenes person? I personally love having Becky here answering questions and putting them in the Google Docs and making it so that I can just talk and think about what the other presenter is saying and respond and just make sure I'm doing a good job as the main presenter. But I know that Sean does it all by himself. So Sean do you want to comment on that? Yeah, I was going to say I do it all by myself all the time, but guess what? This morning I did a training and I grabbed one of my account managers and said, will you be my co-presenter? Will you do what Becky is doing right now? And I would also recommend that when and if you can. It just makes life easier. This conversational way to give a presentation and work back and forth I think is more engaging. But if you can and somebody's got that skill level and maybe have that chemistry built with a team member, I would recommend that. I do them alone most of the time, but whenever I can, I grab one of my team members and say, will you do this with me please? We have a couple other people here at TechSoup trained in on how to do it and it doesn't take any time but the actual webinar. So Becky did help in this case because she helped me normally with the webinars, but she would normally not have to spend any time other than just doing the co-producing part. Another question, let's see, what are our thoughts on giving presenters the ability to drive the tool? Do you think that in the case the chairperson should be the only driver? I'm perfectly happy letting other people drive if they know what they're doing. The one thing if we're doing a software demonstration like Sean was doing that folks not do certain things like if you're going to the Internet and you're going to show a website, people have this weird tendency to roll their mouse up and down so the websites go up and down and it keeps redrawing and redrawing and redrawing and just turns the screen into a weird garbled mess. So there's some things you just have to then be more explicit about when you're doing your own through. But to have them take that control makes it a more engaging webinar. I think that they are a more engaging presenter if they're moving the slides themselves. And I would definitely encourage that to be what you use if you are able to do that. I'm going to be doing a webinar or more of just a web conference and I'll be producing it next week with someone who is calling in from Africa and doesn't have broadband so they'll just be calling in and they won't have access to the Internet at all so we're having to drive their slides for them. And we'll see how that goes but I wouldn't recommend it. I think it will go well. And one quick tip on that, and this is just my personal opinion, when you are pushing the slides for your speaker, one of my pet peeves is having the speaker say things like, next slide please, Kami, move to the next slide. That just rubs me into the wrong way. So get in the habit of coaching with your speaker and say something like, when you want to go to the next slide, say something subtle like and as you can see on the next slide, or as we move to the next slide, we are going to illustrate. And it's just so much smoother. I feel like you are in elementary school with the film strip. Maybe I'm dating myself and you hear peep and it means you go to the next one. So try to get out of that habit even if it's just to make me not cringe in the background. So here is an interesting question or kind of comment as well. Can you do a hybrid training where some of your audience is face to face and some online? I've never tried that. Sean, have you? Oh yeah, absolutely. And whether we replace training with annual meeting or internal meeting, those kind of things, you can absolutely do that. Now the environment may be a consideration. It could be a training room which might not be a bad idea. So everybody gets there with the terminals or maybe they bring their laptop in. Maybe things are on an LCD screen and they are live around a speaker phone. And you also have remote folks dialed in and logged in as well. And you can all do it together. So the group that is live would be a consideration. How many terminals? How is everybody going to see it? Do they have their own? Is it LCD? That kind of thing. I do that quite a bit actually. And I've heard that there are groups that will come together with a projector and speakers and all watch it together which is great for us because they are only using one phone line. We actually have a limit of 150 people who can participate in any one webinar. So I love to hear people doing that. One last question, how do you track who uses your online anytime webinar? So like I said, we have these all recorded and available for folks to watch. Another great aspect of ReadyTalk is that it can track the number of views to each recording. You can require people to answer questions before they see the recording. And normally I kept them open. So you click on it and you are able to go to the recording and just watch it. And we had a lot of hits through that. We changed it and added required registration, just putting in your name and your email address. And we saw a huge drop in the number of people watching them. So either the spy bots were clicking on it or the people just didn't want to give up their information which I totally respect. So we've actually just recently changed it back so you don't have to register it all. You just click and watch the recording because we are just testing it out to see if the numbers go back up again. And they will. It's a great resource. So some other great resources to go back to this list which again I will send in the follow-up email, a couple of webinars I've done in the past that are similar to this topic. And the producing webinars for nonprofits and libraries is more of a high level overview. It doesn't get into the real nitty gritty that we got into today. And a couple of articles that we wrote as well as a few good online conferencing tools was written by Idealware and then the link to ReadyTalk's training page. And to quickly tell you a little bit about the ReadyTalk donation on TechSoup, it's $45 per year. You have up to a certain number of participants that are free that you pay $0.06 per minute per participant. All these rules, this was taken directly off of the TechSoup site. So sorry that it's so text heavy, but we'll include a link to this page in the follow-up email. And if you do have additional questions, I know I saw some additional questions I didn't get to answer and I apologize, but please do post those to our community forums and we can answer it. I can answer it. Maybe if Sean would be so kind as to check in and answer those, that would be great as well. It's a great way. If you haven't checked out our community forums, there's lots of topics that you can post if you have questions about your donor database program or your server or any number of things. It has volunteers watching those questions come through and posting answers. So it's a great resource. And to tell you just a little bit more about some of the things that we offer here at TechSoup, if you know us mainly for our donation program and our webinars, we also have articles and a blog. And we have the community forums that I just mentioned as well as we do post information about upcoming events and conferences. And we do have some webinars coming up. I will provide some information about these in our follow-up email, but next week on Thursday we'll be talking about event registration specifically Activa, which is one of our donor partners. And then we have a series of digital storytelling webinars at the end of the month beginning, the two-day kind of big event that we're having. So for those of you out there interested in digital storytelling, how to create one, what the tools are, we have a lot of resources then for you. And I just want to close with a big huge thank you to ReadyTalk and of course John, but ReadyTalk for providing us this service and enabling us to offer this for free to nonprofits and libraries. And ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services and information on how you can learn more about that. And thank you to everyone for participating today and asking great questions and to Becky and to Sean. And I hope you learn some new stuff. Make sure to complete the post event survey that will pop up as soon as we close this window and have a great day. Thanks Sean. You are welcome and thank you for inviting me. So hopefully we'll get to speak with the group very shortly. It'll be great to keep in touch with you guys. Excellent. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye-bye everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.