You dream of an amazing opportunity: Hosting a webinar featuring a business productivity expert. It’s a two-for-one: you can provide the team a quality training and draw attention to the company. Then you recall your plans for perfecting an online training course. It’s a project you started a month ago but haven’t quite finalized yet. 
Suddenly it dawns on you – there’s that big corporate online meeting you have to facilitate next week. And it’s on you to manage all the aspects of these online events. The pressure mounting to achieve your plans while also managing your daily load can feel overwhelming.
Excuse the cliche, but in this situation, there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too.
Some web conferencing providers offer an online event facilitation service. They can help you manage the entire production that goes into hosting a webinar, running an online training, or facilitating an online meeting. While they assist on those fronts, you can return to your dreams and prioritize the development and delivery of excellent event content. Let someone else handle the facilitating!
It’s important not to confuse facilitation with sub-categories, like facilitating the design and delivery. Online event facilitation represents everything from assistance in planning a virtual room, to presentation rehearsals, to managing technical issues during the delivery, to post-conference discussions. Facilitation is all of the above and more.
Facilitating a webinar is a complex process. As a result, there are many instances in which having that assistance can be a tremendous benefit. Here are a few examples of when online event facilitation makes sense.
As mentioned above, maybe you’ve desired to bring in an expert to lecture. Being able to have an authority host a webinar can be a tremendous benefit to your business. Their expertise brings credibility while also drawing the outside interest and attendance your marketing team has been craving.
Keep in mind that just because a guest lecturer may be an expert in their field, does not mean that the online format is a comfortable setting for them. A good facilitation service takes the necessary steps to make sure any speaker is in sync with the presentation. In the days leading to a webinar, facilitators often offer multiple dry-runs that review accompanying information, and final consultation can be held before the webinar itself.
Always recall why you brought in your guest lecturer: to reap the benefits of their knowledge. The goal should be to give them reign to educate while all the back-end technicalities are handled by a certified facilitator.
Give yourself some credit – you’ve successfully held large online trainings in the past. Training 100 people at one time no longer seems like a big deal. But what about the next step up? What about training 300 people?
This can be a huge challenge. Beyond having to prep content appropriate enough to meet the needs of all those people, you have to deliver said material and then manage responses. You can certainly expect 300+ people will have a few questions, and it’s simply not possible to respond to all of their questions on your own. With a certified webinar facilitator at your side, you can keep your focus on delivery while they address issues and comments.
In this example, you also have to ensure the webinar goes off without a hitch. One issue can lead to a glitch-ridden, static nightmare where your statements are coming out garbled. A certified facilitator checks call quality prior to the online training to make sure your audio is solid. During the online training, they will also handle any technical problems that arise.
As with the guest lecturer, a facilitator can help you prepare by running through the material numerous times. This preparation is a sure way to help manage the challenges of such a large training.
All of this assistance also allows you to get back to your goals: developing better and richer content for the perfect online training course.
The big dogs have all gathered at their various locations to hold a Quarterly Review. You’ve been asked to help manage the facilitation of this meeting. Perhaps this isn’t quite your area of skill, and managing such a meeting seems about as daunting as skydiving – you can’t mess up.
Facilitation services extend to all of your online events, and you shouldn’t have any challenges connecting with a facilitator who can help you. The keys to the facilitation of such an event relate to the coordination of managing who’s talking, who’s muted, and who needs to be talking. The last thing you want in this setting is a noisy background in one of the big wigs’ offices.
Using a facilitator, they can help to negotiate between speakers, appropriately managing the time they talk, while also navigating between the information that is being presented.
We’ve facilitated a few webinars in our day. For an idea of roughly how many, check out our webinar page to see. On average, our webinars host between 150 and 300 participants, but sometimes even upward of 500. In each instance, we take the steps needed to ensure our speakers (both in-house and guest) are comfortable, including holding the above-referenced dry-runs and consults.
As you will find in all of our webinars, there’s a huge behind the scene’s effort taking place. We have a few people managing the Q&A Pod – in which highly specific or technical questions are usually asked, or watching over the general Chat Pod, to make sure the conversation remains focused.
No matter who you are, the facilitation process can be difficult, and you never know what technical issues may pop up. In one of our webinars the host lost power to her house. In an instant she went from leading the conversation to – poof – gone. You would think that would be the end of the webinar. Nope! Our facilitators rushed in and reintroduced a topic from earlier in the webinar (they also used an engaging video game to keep the participants temporarily occupied). The team kept the webinar running until our speaker’s power returned and she rejoined the conversation.
Power outages are but one of many unexpected things that can happen during a webinar, and sometimes you need that helping hand to keep things running smoothly. For a broader picture of how MeetingOne works to help you, check out our online event facilitation page.
As businesses increasingly use web conferencing platforms, online event facilitation will become a necessary resource for ensuring the best possible outcomes during webinars, online trainings, and online meetings.
Most importantly, allowing a facilitation service to guide your online trainings, webinars, and online meetings provides you the time and energy to focus on what you do best: preparing and delivering content. It allows you to drive engagement through personalized interactions. And it maximizes the functionality of your online events.
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