| President’s
Letter
An inside look at ASBPE’s webinars
by Steve Roll, National
President; Senior State Tax Law Editor, State
Tax Report
 ASBPE’s
webinars have received a tremendous response,
with
more than 150 members and nonmembers from
all over the country
participating in our offerings over the past
few months.
Since October, ASBPE has
presented three webinars:
Besides being a convenient
and low-cost source of professional
development, ASBPE webinars can provide
valuable insights to those
who are considering doing a webinar themselves.
(ASBPE members are eligible for a 15%
discount from ASBPE’s webinar provider,
Beacon
Live. The Member
Discount page has details on how to get
the discount.)
One way a webinar works
- Registration. This
involves keeping track of who has signed
up and sending
them
the dial-in information. To keep costs
down, ASBPE has handled the registration
process
itself. But for an additional charge,
a typical webinar vendor will do
this task.
- Phoning in. Participants
dial in to the audio portion of the call
using a phone
number
and code that they receive upon registration.
The audio portion of the event is
a one-way phone call in which the speakers
talk to the participants.
Participants may signal to
the webinar’s moderator that they wish to ask
a question by dialing “01” on their phone.
Other vendors allow typing in questions directly
via a browser.
- The visual component. This
generally consists of PowerPoint slides
displayed on
participants’ computers through their browser.
Usually, the moderator forwards slides
via the vendor’s Internet-based console as
the presentation progresses.
- Testing. Preparations
are necessary to ensure that the content
is presented without a
hitch. Before each ASBPE webinar, the participants
do a “dry
run” in which they call in to
discuss their themes and practice demonstrating
their respective PowerPoint slides.
Mastering
the technical details ahead of time is critical.
Even the
best-planned webinar
can be an embarrassment if it is mired by technical
glitches. ASBPE has successfully
presented each of its webinars, but some required
overcoming obstacles such as e-mailing
and uploading batches of large PowerPoint files.
For one webinar, we were unable to
find a time when a busy B2B publishing executive
could do a dry run.
- Economics. Will you
charge attendees? ASBPE has had significantly
more
attendees
for the webinars it has offered for free, but
also a higher participant drop-out rate.
Also,
is it worth it to pay the vendor to create
an archive of the webinar? While doing
so might
please the few people who missed the webinar,
it
could be a waste of money for content
that might go stale within a few months.
Our next webinar:March
21
Considering all of this,
it is fitting that ASBPE’s
next webinar on March 21 will be Taking
Your Webcasts to the Next Level.
Join us as we continue our grand experiment with
webinars.
By doing
so, you’ll gain valuable insights and be
able to decide which elements of ASBPE’s
webinar you’d like to include in your own
publication’s
offerings.
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