PCMA Webinar

PCMA Webinar

On November 11 2015, I attended a PCMA webinar entitled "Predictions for the Events Industry in 20 years." The webinar was free - you just had to register. The webinar was given by Dan Berger, the CEO of Social Tables. It had a video component in that we could see Dan speaking from his office in DC as well as slides that Dan was changing to go along with his presentation.

The set up of the online webinar

Even though virtual meetings don't lend themselves to as much engagement as in person, there are ways to engage your audience and make them feel included. There was a box set up for chat between all of the participants and a separate box to submit questions only to Dan. He encouraged the attendees to write comments in the chat box to him and one another. There were also polls and around 80% of the attendees were participating in them.

Various polls throughout the webinar engaged the participants
and made them feel like participants rather than audience members.

A big advantage of having a meeting such as this online instead of in person is that people were able to listen in from all over. At the beginning, attendees wrote where they're from in the chat box, and there were people from DC, Boston, Virginia, Australia, Pennsylvania, and Vancouver, just to name a few.

Any time you are using technology, there is a possibility for technical glitches. Dan's video froze briefly toward the beginning of the webinar, but he typed in the chat box that he has an awesome tech, and sure enough within a minute the system was working again. Dan communicated to all of us that they were working on the problem, and they were able to fix it very quickly.

At the end of the webinar, Dan had a question and answer session as well as gave his contact information. Anyone who wanted to find out more about what he spoke about would have the opportunity to do so. After the webinar ended, the program immediately took you to a short survey about the webinar to get prompt feedback on the system and the presenter. The survey was easy to fill out. Participants are more likely to fill it out immediately because they are still thinking about the program rather than if it was emailed to them the next day when they would have to open a new web page and think about their experience again.