As a small business owner with clients who live hundreds of miles away, I spend a lot of time on conference calls and webinars. They help me feel connected and get me info quickly, easily, and inexpensively. I also hear a lot of buzz lately about creating online training for volunteers, and I’m considering how I can offer webinars as part of my products and services. So is it all good? Can this interactive technology really deliver what it promises?
An interesting report by the Goodman Center -- Dialing In, Logging On, Nodding Off: The True Costs of Teleconferences, Videoconferences and Webinars -- provides some insights into what nonprofit staff think about telemeeting technology. They surveyed of over 1,200 professionals involved in the social sector, spanning a wide array of interest areas.
A Few Key Findings
- Across the board, telemeetings received an average grade of B-; not bad, but there's room for improvement.
- Webinars received slightly higher grades that teleconferences and videoconferences.
- The majority participate in teleconferences (60%), while fewer participate in webinars (25%) or videoconfereces (58%).
- About half expect their technology usage will increase.
- Most surveyed felt meetings of 45-60 minutes were the right length.
- Over 70% have never had training on how to use these technologies to conduct a successful meeting.
The most common problems with teleconferences (ranked by significance of negative impact):
The most common problems with webinars were similar:
- Poor Leadership/Facilitation
- Lack of Agenda or Clear Objective
- Boring Visuals
- Difficulty Hearing Other People in Webinar
- Didn’t Receive Support Materials for Meeting or Class
- People on Call Didn’t Participate
What’s a Nonprofit to Do?
It’s unlikely we will be able to do without new technology, so maybe it’s time to improve how we use it. Here are a few ideas:
- Don’t assume that because you are sending information one way, it is being heard and internalized on the other.
- Poll participants after each telemeeting to see how you’re doing in the problem areas listed above. Improve as needed.
- Get training on both how to run better meetings and how to operate and troubleshoot the software and hardware.
- Provide training to participants on how to make the best use of the technology; iron out any technical problems with their individual systems prior to the meeting.
- Rotate facilitators for each topic on the agenda and the leader for each phone call.
- Keep meetings to 60 minutes max; if you have more content, break it up into a series of meetings.
- Start and end on time.
- Make sure there is technical support ready via phone and online via the webinar’s chat function; that person should be not be the facilitator, speaker, or the person managing the slides.
- Mute the phone lines during webinars, encourage people to raise their hands electronically; un-mute when they have the floor.
- Encourage the use of headsets to improve the sound quality.
- Ask people to be verbal about how they are reacting to what’s being said, since you are not able to read their nonverbal cues over the phone.
- Set up the expectation that when you need feedback, you’ll ask each person to chime in.
Do you have tips or ideas? Click on the comments link and share them.
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