Webinar Wire

Webinar Planning Timeline Available

Posted by Ken Molay September 8 2009 9:21 PM EDT

MarketingSherpa has posted a "timeline at a glance" for planning the major steps in hosting a structured webinar. It is only available for open public access until September 10, at which point it becomes part of members-only materials on their site.

The timeline assumes you are working on a public event that includes promotion and marketing. As with any such generic plan overview, you would need to shift details to fit the requirements of your particular situation. But it's not a bad way to remind yourself of some of the key tasks that need to be addressed.

There's just one item on their list that really strikes me as the wrong suggestion for a standardized best practice. They put a dry run with your speakers as a "1 day prior" activity. Although I have been forced to do run-throughs with speakers the day before my event, I almost always regret it and would never recommend that timing as your target. Dry runs tend to bring up problems... Slides need tweaking, somebody has access problems, somebody else has bad audio. You want time to deal with those issues and preferrably have a final checkup session. If you discover them the day before your event, it's panic time. I shoot for anywhere from 7-3 days before my event for a dry run.

I'd also add one more key task to my timeline... Responding to attendee questions. MarketingSherpa includes sending thank you emails (which we assume also encompasses "sorry we missed you" messages), but you need to schedule time to quickly respond to questions asked during the session that you promised to follow up on, or respond to people who asked for more information. If you put this as an activity on your planning list, it won't seem like an interruption to other work... It just becomes one of the things that is involved in producing a webinar.