Learning from the experience: setting up a webinar from scratch. Part 1

I've attended quite a few webinars in the past few years, and even presented on one or two, but I'd never hosted a session until a few weeks ago. This is my experience.

One of our database vendors had volunteered to present live end-user web demos for our worldwide audience of scientists and engineers. When I mentioned that it was common practice in the company to repeat such presentations in different time zones she didn't balk, and gamely agreed to speak at some very anti-social hours. So that was my first challenge - to come up with a series of dates and times that would suit both of us (Pam in Oklahoma and me in the UK) and would reach people in three different time zones, knowing that it was going to be out of working hours for at least one of us each time.

Yawning koala - National Media Museum

After some to-ing and fro-ing we got a series of options sorted out before the realisation that the morning session in Australia was a different day for them and us, and so I'd be up at 3 am for that session, and then on again at 9 pm the same day for the one in the States. The 2 pm UK session on a different day felt far too easy in comparison!

Then on to a series of emails and news items promoting the events to 4,000 employees belonging to one of our communities of practice. I won't dwell on the details of those as it involved an internal database but I can't say how many times I checked the text before sending to so many people. A tip: set up an email filter to siphon off out-of-office messages in all their variations, as you will be absolutely inundated as soon as you click Send.

I decided to send three separate emails, one for each time-zone session, each with an attachment containing the corresponding Outlook meeting invitation file. On the face of it that looks like a no-no, spamming 4,000 people with essentially the same text, *and* with an attachment (albeit a very tiny one). But I took advice and decided that one email with three sets of instructions was asking for confusion, and as long as the subject lines for each clearly showed the difference, it would be OK.

I was also glad of sending the invitation attachment as it automatically added the meeting to the recipients' calendar if they clicked on it, and I also got notification of acceptance (which made me feel as though someone might actually attend).That came in useful when one of the sessions was postponed 24 hours due to network problems (guess which one), and I could let the registrants know without sending out to all 4,000 people again.

The World Clock Meeting Planner is handy for time planning. I'd be interested to know of similar resources.

Part 2 will cover getting to grips with the teleconference and meeting software, and Part 3 the outcomes of the whole experience.