 Hi everyone, I'm Susan Hopeard with TechSoup and I'm here today to share with you some tips and strategies on delivering a successful webinar. Before we get started, I do want to do a few housekeeping things. I am going to share my desktop with you so that I can show you the course. Bear with me one moment, one moment trying to open up another window. Okay, so I'm going to take you to TechSoup 30. So what you're going to be seeing next is our course, the course that you're in right now. Today's event, July 25th, Tips and Strategies for Building and Delivering a Successful Webinar. If you click on that event, the very first column has a list of resources. There is a chat tips handout which you can download, it's a Google download and we're chatting that out to you right now. There's also 10 tips for creating polling questions. That's another handout that you can use. It's a topic that we're going to be talking about today. And then we also have a best practices document. So each of these things is there for you to use as a resource after the event or you can download them now. So I'm going to go ahead and get started with my presentation. You should be able to see a PowerPoint screen and a couple of tips if for any reason the screen stops, if it buffers or it's not progressing. The best thing for you to do is to refresh your window. So just go up into your browser and just click refresh or just hit enter. And that will refresh the page and that should help. So let's talk a little bit today about tips and strategies for building and delivering a successful webinar. So the first thing we're going to look at are five tips to increase engagement. Really, when you think about it, a webinar is a seminar on a website, right? So you're going to use a variety of platforms to be able to deliver this content. Each type of platform that you use, it could be ReadyTalk, it could be GoToMeeting, it could be Citrix. There's a variety of platforms. Right now we are using Google Hangouts. So that's another platform. One thing to do to increase engagement is to incorporate polling questions. Some platforms automatically allow you to increase polling questions. Others don't. They may have some wraparound tools that you can go to increase engagement through asking those polling questions. The second thing is using images and graphics. It is true. Picture is much better than a bunch of words, especially during a webinar. Third thing is to save time for question and answer. It's very important to be intentional about saving time for your audience to ask you questions. The fourth thing is to make sure that you use the right tone of voice and that you put a smile on your face when you're sharing information. You can actually tell a difference. And then the fifth thing to increase engagement is use of the chat box. Let's take a look at each one of these in a little bit more detail. So let's talk about polling questions. Polling questions can really give you a lot of information about your audience. Sometimes you're producing a webinar for a wide variety, a wide spectrum of folks, a wide spectrum of learners or attendees. So you may want to know how much they know about a certain topic. You may want to know some demographics, what their role is in their organization. You may want to know about more information about what they do at work, what their greatest challenge is. This is just a screenshot from the result of a polling question that was done in actually ready talk and you can see here the results that are shown up are a graph. So it actually shows your attendees how people answer, not the individual answers, but just in aggregate. Another type of question you can use is to really check to see if your audience got what you were trying to say. If you're trying to communicate some core competencies, you're trying to build skills. You may want to intermittently ask some polling questions to ensure that your attendees got the objective of what you were trying to say. A good rule of thumb is if you're doing a 60-minute webinar, have at least three polling questions. Generally speaking, five to 10 minutes apart. Here at TechSoup, we try very hard to do one at the beginning of our 60-minute webinars to either gauge the audience level of knowledge or their interest in a particular topic. And then throughout the 60-minute events that we do, our presenters give us questions that they'd like to ask the participants. Another really good thing to remember is to read the question out loud. There may be folks that are on a mobile device, so they can't see the text. It's too tiny. Please read the question out loud. In addition, read all the potential responses. This is also important for folks that have different abilities. Another thing when you have a polling question is to add not applicable or other and then give people the encouragement to chat in the chat box their response. And again, share the results as this image does. It's also important to talk through the dead time. So if I was going to ask this question, what is your biggest challenge? And then I'd list all of the responses. After I list the responses, I'm still going to give you as participants the opportunity to think through and answer. So as I see all the responses coming in, I might say something like, wow, we've got some pretty fast fingers here. Oh, I see it looks like, wow, a lot of people are overwhelmed or people really have a problem with efficient workflows. So there's not dead time. Another really good thing to do is give people a timeline. All right, I'm about ready to close the poll. I'm going to give you five seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. I'm closing the poll and sharing the results with you. Polling questions are one of the best ways to engage your audience, especially in longer webinars. Let's take a look at the second thing. We're going to look at images and graphs. All right, an important note is not to put too much text on your slides. First of all, it can be distracting to your learners or the participants. Also, the more text you have, the smaller it has to be. So the more difficult it is for people to read it. However, infographics are a great way of showing processes. And also graphs or graphics, things that you create in Excel, PowerPoint, or Word are great ways of showing data. Instead of telling people results, you can show them. Something else to use are images of people. Throughout this presentation that I've tried to create for you, I've tried to use a minimum of, or I've tried to minimize my use of text and maximize my use of images. So images of people can also help your audience make a connection between what you're saying and what they do or who they are. Question and answer, another great way to encourage engagement is to specifically set aside time for your audience to ask questions. Each platform that you use is going to have a slightly different way of doing this. I've seen chat in a formal Q&A in a chat box, where the learners, the participants, chat in their questions. There's somebody on the back end queuing up the questions for the presenter to answer at specific times. Sometimes if it's a live event and you could see everyone's face, it could be a little bit more formal at the end where the person, the learner can actually get on camera and ask the question. It really depends on the format of your delivery and how many participants you have. But it's important to set aside that time. In general, here at TechSoot, we leave 15 minutes for Q&A and also wrapping up the webinar, like the housekeeping at the end, thanking everyone, thanking the presenters, and encouraging folks to do the survey. So do make sure you save that time. When you have multiple presenters, a good place to have Q&A is the transition between the presenters. So that at you, queuing the questions, the context of the question is still available and readily in your mind. Cuz sometimes learners will chat in questions that don't reference the actual statement the presenter made. And then if you wait till the end of the event, you're like, gosh, what was that about? What was that question about? So if you do it in between presenters or at the time, at the end of a particular subject, you will ensure that you fully understand what your learners or your participants are asking. The other thing you should do is to chat out periodically. Hey everybody, we're here for you. We wanna answer all your questions, solicit questions in the chat box during the delivery of the event. Here at TechSoot, we usually have the presenters or presenter. And then we have someone on the back end that solicits questions or that shoots out the links to different events, to handouts, to resources. So the person who is managing that chat box, one of their goals is to also encourage questions in that Q&A. And something else to remember in terms of answering questions. I think it's important to note that you cannot possibly be the know-all of every single thing. And it is perfectly okay to say, you know what? I can't answer that question, but I won't get back to you. And of course it is important for you to actually get back to the learner or the participant that's asking that question. But that does happen here at TechSoot, and we work very hard to follow up with that participant so we can give them an answer. So Q&A, another great way to encourage engagement. The other thing is smiling. And I don't know if you could tell the difference in my voice because I just started smiling when I looked at the picture of the dog. When you begin your event and you welcome everyone and you introduce yourself and you begin speaking, you're setting the climate. So a climate isn't necessarily the temperature in the room, but it's the temperature and the environment you're setting for all of your learners. If you're in an instructor-led training, you know, we're all in one place and you can see my face and I can see your face, that's a different climate setting. But on a webinar, it's much more difficult because you can't see everybody's face and you may not know everyone personally. So it's up to you to set that climate and to try to be as inviting as possible. You also wanna try to show enthusiasm. Use your voice, your tone and your face. Actually, as you change your face, when you say certain things, there is an emotion that comes through in your voice. In fact, there are customer service trainings where they give folks a mirror and they put it on the computer. And what they encourage the folks taking calls to do is to watch their face as they answer questions because if you smile when you're answering the question, that shows through. So it's a good customer service practice. So the same thing with webinars. Try to smile. Also try to remember that everybody on that event is there to learn something, they're just like you. So set that climate, make it a horizontal environment where you are welcoming feedback and you're welcoming questions. Fifth way to encourage engagement is the chat box. And we do have a handout that we've chatted out to you and Alicia's gonna chat it again. But different things that you can do in the chat box. You can solicit feedback. Hey, you know our presenter just talked about digital security. How do you feel about this particular topic? There's ways to solicit feedback in the chat box met prompt engagement. There are different ways to look at this as well. In different platforms, some of the chat boxes are public. The event that they're in right now, everyone can see each other's chat. So if you were gonna chat and it's a, hey, I can't hear or the audio doesn't match the visual or oh, I really like that slide, everyone can see it. Other platforms, the chat is private. So you, the learners or the participants can't see each other's chat. And the administrator of the event can chat out to everyone or to individuals. So you can select the person that you wish to chat with privately if they're having a tech problem or if they're asking a question that may be outside the scope of your training for that day. The other thing you can do is you can chat out resources and links as we're doing now. And you can also use the chat box to help people that are having tech problems. I look at the chat box as like fishing, right? So you, and that's why I use this picture. It's like you're throwing things out and you help you get a hook. You help you get some questions. You help you get some responses and get that engagement. So it's a good thing to practice chatting in the chat box. And when you do get up, when you do get, when you hook someone, right? Try to have a back and forth with that participant or that learner. So now we're gonna talk a little bit about strategies for delivery. So we talked about engagement, right? So this is how you encourage and facilitate, moderate the engagement between participants, the content and the presenters. Now we're gonna talk about your actual delivery and some things that you could do. I could probably have a hundred strategies for delivery, but we only have time in this half hour event for a few. The first thing is to practice. And I was telling Alicia here at TechSoup today, one of the things that's really important for me, not just as a presenter, but as a learner, because I'm always learning, is to practice because I know if I practice, I'll feel better and more comfortable with the language I'm using. I may have a script or some bullet points, but I want to practice enough to kind of sound natural. And if it's a new topic for me, I definitely wanna practice a lot till I own the language myself. The other thing is to be natural. I have a tendency to be kind of high energy, so that's like my native state. Not all presenters are like that, and that is totally okay. But think about it, if you look at this image, you see two women sitting at a table, they're having coffees and food. Think about it like that. In this webinar, you're talking to people like at your kitchen table. You're trying to communicate and be as natural as possible. So be yourself. I think that's what I'm trying to say is just to be yourself. You also wanna illustrate any points you have with stories. So if you're talking about, let's say, setting up a webinar for a large group of people, like 2,000 people, and this actually has happened to me, where I'm doing a webinar from a long distance, very far away, I was in St. Croix, I was telling Alicia the story. I'm delivering the event, and my internet was very sporadic. So I was buffering, I was like going in and out, and I had my cell phone, and my boss was texting me what the problem was. So I was in not a great situation, but I tried to mitigate by going slower. All of my PowerPoint presentation had been shared with our audience in advance, and I could also look at the text while I was delivering the webinar and still look into the camera and say, okay, so I know we're having some tech difficulties, but that is an illustration of this point with the story. And I'm sure that all of you out there or all of you that watch this in the future, whatever you're gonna talk about, you're going to have some real life experience, build that into your presentation, and in fact, tell that the things that didn't go so well because those are just as important as your success stories. Let people learn from the things that you didn't do so well at or that you failed at because they hopefully won't have the same experience and you will have taught them that. And lastly, even though it's probably should be number one, always have a co-pilot, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about each of these things. So here's this image of this child. Practice does make perfect. It is true. Practice by yourself. Get familiar with it. Take notes. Use your own handwriting. Like I've got this PowerPoint presentation and I just hand wrote some notes and things I wanna talk about. Practice with your co-pilot so they can say, hey, Suzanne, that point, no. We use a different example, right? Be open to feedback. It is important that you remember what's in your head and what makes sense to you may not always make sense to other folks. Be a learner. I also encourage you to use bullets rather than a script. It is usually easy to tell when someone's reading from a script and it sounds unnatural. So if you have bullets, you're more likely to intersperse some of your own natural language with that. Even if occasionally it is an um or an off. Here's the be natural. Here's like, this is a bass and hound and a baby. How much more natural can you get than a bass and hound and a baby? I'm sorry, you just can't. But use your own style of delivery if you're more serious. Be more serious, that's fine. Tell the truth. If you don't know the answer to something or you're not sure about information that you're sharing or a statistic, if someone asks a question, be honest and say you'll get back to them. Follow up with people that ask questions that you can't answer during the event. And the last point here is modeling the way. And this is often more difficult in life than it is to talk about. So it's sort of like the do as I do, not as I say. Because a lot of people, they're modeling the wrong way but they're saying the right thing. So when you are delivering a webinar, try to do all of these things. So other people that are gonna be learning from you and may deliver their own event will be able to pick up those great habits and those best practices. As I said, illustrate with stories. This is actually a story time in a library. So I have worked in library land for a number of years as the early literacy coordinator at Baltimore County Public Library and a consultant for the American Library Association. And my big thing was story time and helping library staff and volunteers develop programming that was developmentally appropriate for birth to age six. So story times were my favorite thing to help model for parents and children. The best way to have a relationship around books. So again, illustrating with stories provides the context. It helps your audience identify what you're talking about conceptually with a practice and it also follows that narrative arc. And then lastly, have a co-pilot. So your co-pilot handles the chat, they curate and queue up questions, they deal with tech challenges and also help provide feedback. I can tell you that I've done events alone. It's not that it's impossible to do but it's impossible to do well and to do without stress. And the more stressed you are, the more likely you are to make mistakes or that that's gonna come through to your participants and you want your participants or your learners to have a good experience and to enjoy it. So if you have someone in the back end, they're gonna be able to help provide that support and it makes you feel like you've got that moral support on the back end that is handling all of the issues or problems. So those were the five tips for delivering a successful webinar. And I wanna thank you for your attention during this and I also wanted to see if you had any questions. So one of the questions that I would, that's been proposed in the chat is number one, is how to select your webinar topic. That's a good question. Ideally you think about what do your participants or your learners need to learn. So the context might be if you're doing an internal training for your staff or if you're doing an external training. So the first thing I'd say to you is try to come up with the objectives. What are you trying to teach people? What's the behavior you wanna see and where they are now and then you can come up with the topic whether it's five tips to be able to respond to people on the desk in a library. And that's a very loose topic but that would be one thing or if you're talking about digital security or employees that are traveling overseas. So that would be a good way to start with the objectives, what you want people to walk away with and then you can build like your title and your description. So that's more the topic area. Does that help? Yes, well that's a really good point because often people are busy doing other things while they're watching the webinar. I know it's shocking but it is true and that's okay, right? Because we record all of our webinars and you probably will too and that's a reality. If you don't have people chatting in questions and you've tried to solicit by chatting out to individuals or chatting out to the whole group good ideas before you get started. Sit down with your co-pilot or your presenter and write a list of canned questions. And we do this all the time because these are questions we think people might have or if we've done the presentation before then we know this was a frequently asked question. So then we just have the co-pilot ask the question or we know that we can somehow work that in. Okay, so the question was, okay, so the second question was what do you do if no one chats in any questions? Nobody has any questions and you've dedicated five, 10, 15 minutes to your Q and A session. And what I had mentioned was in advance with your co-pilot and your presenter or as a team, sit down and write a list of questions that you believe should be answered. So it could be a frequently asked question that you've seen before with this particular topic. It could be questions based on your presentation that you know need to be reiterated. Most people need to hear things at least three times for them to be able to internalize it and then they need to be able to use the information to be able to really formally adopt that behavior. So doing those things can help like generate some additional questions but it also gives you some of that time to go back and forth with your presenter and your co-pilot. And I hope I hope that answered the question. All right, all right. Any other questions? How do you deal with technology difficulties? I gotta tell you, technology difficulties are something you should anticipate and you should plan for. Depending upon the platform you use with Google Hangouts where we are right now, I myself, we practice but I've still made mistakes. So your co-pilot can help you. There have been times where the volume isn't up or my mic was off. So doing a dry run in advance and testing things out helps. The second thing is your co-pilot should tell you if they see like nine chats, that something's wrong with the audio or that the video isn't matching, what they're seeing on the screen isn't matching their audio, that's something that should alert you that something may be more wrong than just something you can control on your end. We use a platform called ReadyTalk and I've used WebEx and GoToWebinar and sometimes these things do happen and you need to then make sure you tell your audience if you can't hear or you're having difficulties, please do chat in now so then you can escalate that to the platform manager, whether that's ReadyTalk or an operator that can assist you with the tech challenges. It could be something that's not on your end at all. It could be something on the end of your learner. So myself, I am plugged in ethernet right now but some people join via wifi, right? And their connectivity may not be so great so the reason they're having tech difficulties could be their internet connection which you can't do anything about but you can try to help them troubleshoot, right? You can tell them, you know, see if you can connect to an ethernet, if you have wifi, maybe you want to reboot, try again. In some platforms, it's easy to close out and then re-log into the platform and that could reset the connection. All of these things should be on your checklist and when you and your co-pilot just like before they take off on a plane they go through a checklist, that's what you should do just before you start your webinar and Alicia is sitting beside me and we did this before we started today so that I could minimize the tech difficulties. Sometimes you can't erase them because they may be outside the scope of your ability but you should learn how to try to walk through with people what they could possibly do to fix their connection or to fix the problem. And we have different things that we chat out to our audience so that if they're having difficulty viewing or hearing, there's an alternative number they can call in so that they're not hearing things from their computer speaker. And each platform will give you a variety of resources and functionalities so it really depends what you use. Google Hangouts here allows you to change the rate so you can go all the way up to HD or it could be at a very low rate. When you logged on to this webinar, Google Hangouts automatically adjusts and then you can go in and change it if you want it puts the power in your hands. Some other webinar platforms, it's just your internet connection and you don't have any flexibility to change that. And I think that's all the question. Okay, those are all the questions. Then what I want to do is close out because it's actually one o'clock. Wow, okay, or it could be three o'clock if you're on the East Coast. I want to thank everyone for joining us today and I want to let you know that next week we will be talking about tips and tricks for hosting an effective Facebook live event. So what you may want to do if you are conducting live events at your nonprofit, you go back to July 11th, it's kind of an overview of how to plan your first nonprofit live event. And July 18th was about making your event a social success. Today was about webinars. Next week is Facebook live. And then after that, we'll be talking about successful meetups or successful community events. So I want to thank you for your time and your attention. And I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thanks so much. Oh, and I want to thank Alicia, my co-pilot. All right, bye-bye.