this document will give you the key concepts and guidelines … · 2013-06-21 · commonplace in...

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This document will give you the key concepts and guidelines presented by Ken Molay in his web seminar on guidelines for producing and delivering continuing education webinars.

The title I selected for this webinar was not a casual choice. I have found in working with my clients that “Best Practices For…” typically draws higher registration rates than other titles.

This kind of title accomplishes several things. It has an implicit value proposition for the target attendee. Learning best practices means that the listener will be more efficient, more productive, get better results… All things that have a direct, tangible bottom line benefit for them.

It also forces you to pick a specific topic area and clearly state it in a concise manner, right in the title. This helps people zero in on your webinar as content that they are interested in, without having to guess what the subject really is.

Best Practices For Continuing Education Webinars

Ken Molay, Webinar Success

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This slide shows actual webinar titles taken from a webinar search site. They range from excellent to terrible.

The first two titles are perfect. “How to” tells the registrant they are going to get something tangible, not just an academic recitation. The rest of the phrase is specific and clear as to the subject. The potential registrant could easily sign up without reading another word of description.

E-Mail Communication: Power, Peril, and Protocol –Cute, punchy, and packed with alliteration. It tells you that the topic has something to do with email communication, but what are they covering? Is this a historical backgrounder? A survey of the state of the industry? Tips and guidelines? We’re missing the essential ingredient… Why to care. It catches the eye, but fails to provoke a response.

Website Optimization Tips. Live review of some submitted sites – What kind of optimization? For SEO? For browser performance? For sales conversion? And how compelling is “live review of some submitted sites?” I don’t know what those sites contain and whether they are relevant to me and my interests. The length and separation into two sentences also makes this hard to use in various channels.

Hey, PR pros: Do you ‘Flip?’ – Without the support of its descriptive text, I have no idea what this is about. There is no value proposition, no indication of topic content. It looks like they want me to answer a poll question!

Performance Management – What about it? Zero value proposition, zero promise, zero information. So zero interest.



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You have now seen two slides in my presentation. It’s a given that you learned something about picking a title. But what else have I demonstrated by example in the way I put together my content?

Stop and think for a moment. What’s different about this presentation from the usual business presentation?



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My very first opening content, pulled straight from the title slide, matched up with the invitation that got you to attend the webinar. Let’s take a look at the bullet points featured in the invitation.



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In crafting the description for this webinar, I made very specific promises about content that would be presented. You were able to self-select as someone interested in exactly what I was going to teach. Look at each phrase. It uses an active verb to convey the idea that you will be able to do something with each piece of information. These contain a great deal of power. They say that the information can be applied, it isn’t simply textbook facts and figures.

Remember that your audience is selfish. They have attended to get something of benefit to them. You made promises in your promotional materials, and the best way to engage attendees is to start delivering on those promises right away.

How did I start this presentation? By picking the first item on the bulleted list of items you had been promised and immediately delivering on that promise.



This means that a major factor in achieving more effective continuing education is setting your audience’s expectations ahead of time. The more explicit and detailed you can be in your promotional materials, the less chance you have of annoying attendees who misinterpreted your statements and expected different information.

Try to emphasize benefits they will receive by attending. This slide highlights key phrases that make promises of value for attending. Using these phrases gets you more registrations, helps your audience self-select to the people most interested in your message, and gets them ready to hear the exact presentation you plan to deliver.



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Another important part of setting expectations and letting your audience find the right webinar is to tell them the level of material that will be presented and who it is appropriate for. Make a clear distinction between introductory and advanced sessions. Be explicit about your intended audience and who is likely to get the most benefit.

Organizers run into trouble by concentrating on the total number of registrants or attendees they can generate. “Let’s make this general so everybody can come!”

Unfortunately, that opens the door for dissatisfaction when the material turns out not to be what an attendee was hoping for. I would rather cut out the “sure to be dissatisfied” crowd BEFORE they have a chance to view me as wasting their time.



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In addition to the things you saw, there were some things you did NOT see at the beginning of this presentation. They were conspicuous by their absence because they are so commonplace in business presentations. And they are the things that annoy attendees, either consciously or subconsciously.

Do you know what I’m referring to? Let’s take a look.



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Why didn’t I start with a little background about me and my qualifications? Wouldn’t that lend credibility to what I’m about to teach?

Nope. That information might have played a small role in building your confidence enough to register, so we put a little about me on the description page. But once in the session itself, you are here to get value. Attention spans and patience are both much shorter for web audiences than local audiences.

So grit your teeth and eliminate the introductory material. Get to the content. Delivering value quickly and addressing the points you promised in the description builds more credibility than anything you could possibly say about yourself.

If you want to know more about me, it’s on the resources page I’ll discuss later as another of our best practices.

One final note… There are exceptions to this rule, but they are few and far between. If you are featuring Hilary Clinton, Robert Redford, or Bill Gates as your speaker, go with the cult of celebrity. Attendees are there for the power of the personality. If attendees don’t quiver with anticipation at the mention of your name, you aren’t going to convince them how great you are with a big introduction.


I also didn’t start the session with a poll… “Let’s find out a little about you.”

Yes, it can help you focus your presentation to suit the audience. But the time isn’t right at the start of a webinar.

Your attendees enter in “selfish mode.” They want something from you. Information and value.

If you start off with a request for them to supply you with information, it turns the dynamic of the information flow 180-degrees from their expectation.

Build the psychology of giving TO the attendees before taking FROM them. Now that I have provided some value and shown you that you will be primarily “taking” from me, you are more willing to respond by graciously “giving” some of your information to me.


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I didn’t use an agenda either. I am an outspoken advocate AGAINST the use of agendas in presentations. They put the focus on the wrong thing.

An agenda tells the audience how the presenter decided to structure the content. “I’m going to talk about this, then I’ll talk about that.”

Your attendees are not particularly interested in the mechanics of how you chose to structure the flow of the presentation. They want value. You should be working to engage their interests and emphasize their needs and priorities.


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If I am so set against agendas, does that mean you should never put in milestone or section break slides? Not at all… They can be immensely useful. You want your attendees to get a sense of forward momentum, that you are accomplishing something.

Try to develop a motif. Something that reminds your audience that you are checking things off THEIR priority list rather than your own.

Since I focused on the “invitation promises” idea early in this presentation, it makes it very easy for me to come back to it and say, “Now what’s the next thing I promised you? Oh yes…”

So that’s just what I’m going to do!



Encourage your audience to use the chat area. We have been taught not to talk over a speaker on stage while we are in the audience. You need to teach your audience that typing something while you are talking is not rude… It is helpful!

Find a way to encourage and reward casual keyboard interaction early in your presentation. Even before the official start time, you might want to ask people to type where they are located or how the weather is, or what they are looking forward to in the talk. Anything to let them see that you are a real person paying attention to them and responding directly to them. Even something as trivial as asking them to type in their first names works. The key is to respond and show that the information flow is not just one way from you to them.

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You need to yank your audience out of its passive listening mode where your words wash over them. Invite and encourage them to turn their brains on and get intellectually involved in the presentation. Instead of just listing your facts, invite them to contribute their thoughts and guesses as to what might come next.

You can do this explicitly by asking people to type things into the chat area, or you can simply tell them to think to themselves what the answer to a question might be.

I have done this several times already. Did you notice me asking questions about “What did you NOT see?”

That let me get to my tips about agendas by challenging you. Instead of just giving you a piece of information, I invited you to turn on your brain and see if you could mentally interact with the topic.

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Let your audience know that they are a part of the webinar experience. Make reference to comments that people enter. Talk to your audience conversationally, rather than in a declamatory fashion. You don't want them to think they are listening to a generic recording.

Continually remind the audience that the information is for their benefit and that you care about their needs and interests.

Make use of first names. When a question comes in, say the name of the person who asked it. If you see a fun comment, reference the person who wrote it by name.

I recommend first names rather than full names for three reasons:

Privacy concerns. Some people don’t want their full name mentioned in public.

Embarrassment concerns. This is very similar to privacy, but lets people know that even if they say something you disagree with or that seems like a “stupid question” in their mind, at least nobody will know who it came from.

Familiarity and friendliness. We respond well to first names. It makes the speaker sound like she cares who is out there and is treating audience members like respected individuals rather than just talking to a big amorphous group.



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Polls are the most obvious interaction mechanism in webinars, but you have to be very careful when planning your polls. One of the most important tips is to make sure your polls are “universally applicable.” Every attendee should be able to pick one of the choices. Always have a catch-all answer for outliers. Answer choices such as “Not applicable”, “Don’t know”, “None of the above”, or “Other” are your friends!

The poll you see here might cover 95% of the attendees. But in a Continuing Education webinar where I might need to use polls to validate participation for CPE or CLE credit, the other 5% need a chance to take part as well.


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This poll uses made-up terms and double-talk. I’m just trying to make a point. I have seen educational webinars with polls phrased as complex word problems like this.

Such a quiz might be all right as a hardcopy workbook exercise in a classroom, but it brings a webinar to a screeching halt.

It takes too long for attendees to read and comprehend the question and to parse the complex answer choices. If you read answers a and b, you will see that they are not clearly exclusive of each other. Attendees get confused over which to pick.

And from a sheer “nuts and bolts” perspective, most webinar products would have a problem displaying a poll that is this wordy.


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Polls and questions aren’t the only thing that work differently in online vs. offline modes. The way you display content is radically different.



Many presenters build text-oriented slides full of long, grammatically perfect sentences. These slides work perfectly after the presentation as a standalone handout. And therein lies the problem. If the slide does all the work of conveying the information content, there is nothing left for the presenter to do but read it to the audience.

Presentation content must SUPPORT what you say, not duplicate it. Look for ways to cut text to a bare minimum on your slides. Pretend each slide is an old-fashioned telegram and you are being charged by the word.


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It is perfectly reasonable to want your presentation to be repurposable for use as a leave-behind or reference document. Here is a simple methodology to use.


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Copy all the text information that would have gone onto the slide into the notes area of your PowerPoint.

This process not only cleans up your visual slide area, but it helps you formalize exactly what you want to say when presenting each slide.

By moving the text off the slide, you eliminate the possibility of being seen as that most annoying kind of presenter… One who merely reads the slides out loud to the audience. It is easier to come across as a true subject matter expert rather than just a sight-reader.


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The slide area can then be used for short keywords and a visual that can be taken in quickly. The audience will be able to concentrate on your voice during the webinar, but will be able to see the visual slides and the full descriptive text when reading it later. That’s what you are reading now… A sort of e-Book generated by printing my notes pages to PDF. All of this uses basic PowerPoint functionality… No third-party products required.


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More and more attendees are choosing to watch webinars on mobile devices. These introduce special considerations for presenters. You need to worry about such things as:

Screen size

Connection speed – latency

Distractions

Difficulty interacting with the presenter

Background noise

For the sake of time management, I am going to concentrate on the first and most important of those points. Screen size tremendously affects your design decisions.

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Complex diagrams, charts, and tables featuring small text are always frustrating to web attendees. They almost never have time to study the image, read the details, and come to a complete understanding of the data. It is even worse for attendees viewing on laptops, tablets, or smart phones.

Have you been noticing the design of my slides? I constrain each slide to a single topic concept illustrated by one large picture that fills the page. You can take it in at a glance on any size display and then concentrate on the words I am saying.

If you feel you absolutely must show “the big picture” to convey an overall architecture, quickly zoom in to one sub-area of interest at a time. I did this with my bullet points overlay on top of the webinar invitation you saw early in the presentation.



Here we see reference material copied in as a graph with explanatory text, axis labels, grid lines, and statistical information.

The copied graph carries superfluous information that does not add value for the audience in the context of the presentation. The point the presenter wants to make is buried within a mass of additional data, and the audience cannot quickly interpret what is important.

Let’s look at a redesign that carries the audience through a story line about the concept the graph is illustrating.

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I used a series of builds so the audience can concentrate on each point I want to make, assimilate it, and be ready to move ahead with the story I am telling.

I can always provide the source data with all the numbers as a handout after the fact. But I have to remember that a slide presentation is the wrong place to ask people to analyze and interpret detailed data. Especially in a marketing context. My goal here is to get them interested enough to want to study the details later.

So let’s look at this study that was done. You can see all these different industrialized countries. Each one shows the country’s Gross Domestic Product averaged out to a per-person amount, going higher as you move to the right. Vertically it shows the average per-person health care spend.

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It’s pretty easy to fit a nice smooth line along these points. Generally on a per capita basis, as GDP goes up, health care costs go up proportionally.

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The USA per person GDP is way out there at the right. So we would expect our per person health care costs to be somewhere around that line, where I’ve drawn the red circle, right? It makes sense compared to all the other countries.

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But look where our health care spend really is. Wow. Way above the average.

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What could account for that gap? Why is the US spending so much more money per person on healthcare than the other countries of the world?

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Continuing Education webinars are frequently presented by guest speakers. Often you want to bring in an acknowledged subject matter expert or the author of a report on the topic. But knowing the subject does not necessarily mean the person can communicate it well. Let’s look at some small and simple things you can do to improve the effectiveness of a webinar led by a guest speaker.



First, and most importantly, make sure the presenter knows and buys in to the promises made in the promotional materials and session description. Speakers need this information early (and ideally should be instrumental in defining it). Tell them up front that their presentation should make sure to address each of the “You will see” and “You will learn” promises.

When you get a draft of their presentation, check it against the invite to make sure it fulfills those promises. If not, the presenter needs to refine the content.



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Each speaker should know exactly how many minutes their portion lasts. As the host or coordinator, you should calculate milestone timings for each part of your webinar. Determine ahead of time whether you will start on time or 1-2 minutes late to accommodate late arrivals.

How much time will be spent on introductions and instructions? How much time is allotted to each speaker? How much time will you leave for Q&A? Don’t forget to allot time for a final wrap-up and goodbye to the audience. Write down the timings list and distribute it to your presenters.

I usually estimate 2 minutes of session time per interactive poll.



99% of all business presentations are terrible. If you just ask your guest to create some slides and leave it at that, you will almost certainly get back a set of bullet points written as a script that the presenter will read to the audience. It will start with three slides created by their corporate marketing group, advertising their company and how big they are. It will build linearly, starting with the most boring and well-understood concepts, carefully designed to put the audience to sleep.


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You can help by creating an outline and structure for the presentation first. Maybe create some slides with a quick note or an idea sketch as placeholders. Give that to your guest.

Offer to help find a few graphics to spice things up visually. You will have an easier time helping to guide the presentation if you can offer small isolated suggestions along the course of development, rather than having to address a host of issues all at once a week before it is due.

Give your presenter an early deadline that will give you time to work with the material and improve it.


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In a worst case scenario, where your presenter seems intent on reading bullet slides to the audience like a “Books On Tape” presentation, you might want to suggest just putting slide titles on the screen and using an interview or panel format. You introduce each topic point and ask him/her for their experiences, insights, or tips. The back-and-forth nature can make the presentation more natural sounding and enjoyable. It also lets you act as a moderator or host to represent the audience’s interests and bring them into active participation by throwing some questions to the crowd.


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There are times when you know as much about the subject as your guest. It can be very frustrating when you have good examples and stories that illustrate their points or you want to make additional comments on something they have raised. Or when you want to answer an audience question yourself.

But unless you have explicitly agreed beforehand on a collaborative presentation approach, you need to let them have the spotlight and the recognition as the subject matter expert. If we make an analogy to a comedic duo, your job is to play “the straight man.” It’s not as fun, but it’s a crucial role in making them look good.

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As host or coordinator, you need to help your guest speakers find ways to embellish the material they present and make it interesting.

Help them understand that their job is not to be “a talking textbook.” Attendees can read facts on their own. The presenter’s job is to expand on the basics, to personalize the audience's relation to the information. To bring a sense of enthusiasm to the topic.

If you see slides full of fully-formed sentences that leave the presenter little to do but read them to the audience, suggest that they take the full text into their speaker notes and put less on the slide. This will enhance their being perceived as a person who is offering value above and beyond what the slide says.

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Attendees gain a great deal of value from interactive questions and answers. There are many options and alternatives in deciding how to deal with Q&A. I do not propose absolutes in one approach over another. Each can be used effectively.

You can refer to questions throughout the webinar, answering them within the general flow. This takes an experienced presenter, as it is easy to get sidetracked and run out of time for the formal material.

You can build in breaks for a few questions after each sub-topic.

Or you can take all questions at the end. This is safest for novice presenters who are easily distracted or likely to run over their time slot.

I generally prefer taking typed questions rather than giving attendees the microphone. It lets you choose what you want to address and relieves you of problems in dealing with poor audio quality, hard-to-understand voices, or long rambling queries.



I like opening a Word or Notepad document on my screen with some standard phrases that I know I might need in communicating to audience members. Then I can copy and paste a quick typed response to individual questions. Some of the most common audience questions include:

Can I have a copy of the slides?

Do we get education credits for attending?

I’m having problems, can I still get credit?

Is this recorded?

I’m watching with others, can they get credit too?

Who should I contact for help?

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If you will be answering audience questions, make sure to prepare three or four “seed questions” in case your audience is slow in coming up with their own. You can present the questions as if they came from the audience, helping them see that participation is valued and giving them time to finish typing their own questions. Hearing questions from others always stimulates additional questions.

You should also decide whether your prepared questions take higher or lower priority than real audience questions and whether there are any topics that you don’t want to address on the air.

Decide ahead of time who will select and read out the questions.


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If you run an open chat or an open phone line, there is always the potential to get inappropriate comments from an audience member. Remember… if your entire audience heard the problematic remark, they deserve to see that you are handling it. Start politely:

• Let’s keep comments appropriate for a public audience with respect for all our guests. Thank you!

• Let’s refrain from advertising our own products and services so that the webinar doesn’t turn into a Craigslist session!

A second violation may require a private warning response from you such as “This is inappropriate for our meeting. Please do not continue in this vein or we will remove you from the session.”

As a last resort, know how to remove an attendee from the session and be prepared to do it. I have almost never needed to do this on a professional webinar. Most people will remain within your guidelines if you make it clear what the ground rules are.

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Let’s close by mentioning ways to be effective after the last slide of the webinar.



Crafting surveys has alternatives just like taking audience questions. The more detailed your questions are, the more value you can get as a host or speaker, and the more you can use the answers to help you refine your offerings. But more questions always results in a lower completion rate. If you run enough webinars, you might want to try asking a general-level question on all of them, but swap in one or two detailed questions in each survey so you get a sense of specific concerns without overwhelming your audience.

Depending on your webinar software, you may be able to display the survey while inside your session or it may pop up automatically at the end. Response rates are generally higher if you show the survey before people log out.

Finally, you can ask people for their contact information or leave their responses anonymous. Generally you get more responses when they don’t have to fill in the extra fields about themselves. I usually give them an optional contact field to complete if they would like to be contacted.



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Here are some suggestions to make your surveys for valuable:

1) If possible, allow separate evaluations for each speaker. Respondents get frustrated if you ask about presenter quality and one was good while another was bad.

2) I try to provide a text field for comments with every scale-based question. Let people explain or elaborate on their ranking if they wish.

3) Try to keep your scales consistent between questions. It makes life easier for responding and for analysis.

4) Allow people to request additional contact with their preferred email or phone number.

5) This is sneaky. If your survey software allows multiple pages, ask one or two overall satisfaction/comments questions on page one. Then use page 2 for more detailed breakdowns. People may drop out when they see the more detailed questions, but at least you have a sense of their overall satisfaction.


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Telling your audience to do one easily remembered task is the most effective. When I have lots of follow up information, I like to put together a simple web page of resources and links. Then the action item at the end of the web meeting is to visit that one page.

In this webinar, I created a very simple web page with web links, documents, blog posts, and my information. Then I used a URL-shortening service to give it an easily accessible name.

http://j.mp/ceresources

Now you have a one-stop shop for resources, review, and passing the information along to others.


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The great thing about these best practices is that you can pick and choose to suit your particular situation. Start with one area you can improve. Make a small change. Then move on to another candidate for improvement.

As you refine your techniques, you will become more comfortable and confident in the sessions you offer your members. And your audiences will look forward to your offerings as a valued resource that brings them value.



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I welcome any comments or questions you might have. Please feel free to email me or use the contact form on the Webinar Success web site. You can also search through thousands of articles on my blog for additional tips and tricks.


this document will give you the key concepts and guidelines … · 2013-06-21 · commonplace in...

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