Webinars, Presentations & Training, Oh My

Webinars are happening constantly now as people are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.  My friend, Joe Cardillo, posted some extremely good advice on LinkedIn recently. It was timely because I’d suffered through a 90-minute webinar containing only 30 minutes of useful content. The presenter took 30 minutes telling his backstory (of nominal relevance to the topic) before getting to the content. Then another 20 minutes at the end promoting his services before getting to the Q&As. He broke all of Joe’s guidelines which I’ve tailored and added my own thoughts before sharing below.  This advice is also relevant to in-person presentations and other training sessions.

Want to make your webinars and presentations useful for the attendees? 

• Include only relevant content. Edit out anything not originally built for the webinar’s topic.
• Total time should be one hour – 45 minutes to present and 15 minutes for Q&As from the audience. If you can’t meet this guideline, then cut something out. Times may vary for in-person presentations or virtual conferences. Nevertheless, honor the time that’s allotted. 
• Have structure and don’t wing it. Divide the program into blocks using the topics you plan to cover.  You’ll have some introductory material and some ending material, so plan approximately 10 minutes for each block or segment, depending on the number of segments you have.
• Practice in advance. Review and re-write bullets and talking points. This will keep you on track and succinct, ensuring that the audience remains engaged. If you do, they’ll want to come back for more. 
• Make sure that your slides are engaging.
• Part of practice is timing the webinar. You want to make sure you can cover all of the useful information you plan to share with the audience in 45 minutes or the allotted time.
• Promote it by using an easy-to-understand description that tells people the title (make it informative – 50 to 70 characters maximum). Include what you’ll cover (keep it brief – 50 words or less), who will present, and the length of the webinar. Include a registration page or form.
• Send registrants: one (1) email to confirm their registration, one (1) email to remind them, and one (1) email to announce a replay or recording afterward. Nothing is more annoying than getting multiple and constant emails before and after. I know because my presenter did all those annoying things.

Follow these rules and you will do fine, learn some things, and make your second, third, and fourth webinars even better.

Cornelia Gamlem