Hi everyone, it's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
This time we're going to look at how to run a webinar with Microsoft Teams.
Here at Collaboration Coach
we've been running a regular webinar for our customers for a while now
and we've learned some lessons about what works well
and so I've got some good practices to share to help you run yours.
I'm going to show you how to schedule it,
set up the registration page,
how to run it,
and most important of all - how to keep your audience involved and engaged.
So let's take a look.
To schedule my webinar from the Teams calendar
I just drop the new meeting button down and choose 'webinar',
and then I give the meeting a title and a date and time.
I can choose my presenters here
and these are the people who'll be presenting the webinar with me.
They're not the audience.
The audience will need to register to join and I'll show you how to do that in a minute.
I add Polly as a presenter because we always run our webinars together
and this is the first good practice that I recommend.
Always have at least one co-presenter when you run a webinar.
Next you can set up the registration.
When you create a webinar the required registration lights up
and you must choose who can register.
Drop the list down and you choose either 'people in your org' or 'everyone'.
If your webinar is for the public then you need to choose 'everyone'.
Now, if 'everyone' is greyed out or missing for you, then talk to your administrator
because they will need to activate it.
Next is to create the registration page.
Go to 'view registration form' and open up the editor
and then start to customise your page.
When you upload a banner image it suggests that you need an image that's 918 by 120 pixels
and I find that my images pixelate at that res so I usually size mine at about 2000 by 261 pixels.
That way it will shrink the image down rather than try and blow it up.
I spend quite a lot of time figuring out what to say in the description.
I think you should add something about why it's worth showing up to your webinar
and adding an agenda is a good idea so the audience knows exactly what they're gonna get.
Ask your presenter for a bio so you can show off the creds of your presenters,
and then you can add fields to the form (but we never do that).
I can now grab the registration link and we share that with our school students,
also to our email list subscribers and our followers on YouTube and LinkedIn.
So now I can save the form and finish setting up the meeting.
Now back on the webinar meeting I need to send it first before I can change the meeting options
so i just hit 'send' and now I can go back into the meeting by editing it.
I go to the 'change options' button here
and this will open up the options page in the browser.
Now notice that 'who can bypass the lobby' is set to 'people I invite'
and in my case, that's just Polly.
It means that everyone who joins has to wait in the lobby until I let them in
so this is a really good way of controlling when people can join.
When I'm ready for the audience to join
I usually change this setting about five minutes before the start of the webinar
so I don't have to admit everyone individually.
Notice all the mics and cameras are switched off here and that's normal for webinars
and I leave them like that.
I also switch off the chat because we'll use the Q&A a for all questions
so the chat isn't really necessary.
It's just another thing that we have to moderate so I set it to 'disabled'.
We leave the reactions on and we encourage the audience to use them
and then I hit 'save'.
So back in the meeting now, the Q&A is an app that you can add before the meeting starts
and to do that I just hit '+',
I search for Q&A and then I add it.
We allow the attendees to ask and reply to conversations, but we do moderate the conversations
so I check this box and this just means that Polly can review anything that's said in the Q&A
before it's published.
It means that if anything is said that's inappropriate, it won't be seen by anyone it might offend
and that's never happened yet but you never know.
I think polling is important for keeping my audience involved
and in a one-hour webinar I usually have about four to six polls.
So I hit that '+' button and I search for the Forms app to save it
and I create my polls before the meeting starts but you can do it during as well.
I just find it easier to do it beforehand.
I start with a couple of icebreakers to make sure everyone can respond,
like 'how is everybody feeling',
and then I go with a mix of questions, quizzes and word clouds throughout the webinar
and I usually space them out so they act as a little break from me talking.
I always number the polls as well, in the order that they're going to be shared
so I can easily refer to them during the webinar and Polly knows which one I'm talking about.
Now I nearly always write a script for our webinars.
I just write it in OneNote in rough
and I don't always stick to it word for word
but it does mean that I've written down everything I want to say
and I can get a feel for how long it's going to take and I can trim it
if I think it's going to run too long.
We have a tight agenda that we stick to and I combine the agenda with the script
so I've got a kind of running order that we can follow.
I put directions in there as well like 'start the recording'.
We schedule for about an hour but we aim to finish after about 45 minutes
and any time left we give back, so that people can prepare for their next thing.
And I think 45 minutes is about the sweet spot
so I schedule about 30 minutes for my presentation and demos
and the rest is for answering questions from the Q&A.
If you run a little longer because you've got lots of good questions
then you have that 15 minute buffer.
The worst thing I think you can do is run over.
You can always offer to answer any outstanding questions in a follow-up email.
So when we run the webinar we usually join about 20 minutes before the advertised start time.
I'm the host and Polly is the producer,
and she handles the Q&A, the polling and the recording
and I do the talking, the slides and the demos.
I get my slides ready and I share them with the PowerPoint Live feature before the webinar starts
and this means I can use the PowerPoint presenter view and it won't be in full screen
so I can still see the meeting window and kind of keep track of what's going on.
Polly opens a q a with a statement prompting people to ask questions
and about five minutes before the meeting starts I change the lobby settings
so everybody can bypass it.
Polly has the meeting link ready to send by email to anyone who has trouble joining
which often happens.
People start to join and they'll see the first slide of my deck
so they know they're in the right place.
I always put an agenda in my slides and then I cover all the items in it
because I think if people have seen the agenda on the registration page
and perhaps have only signed up to hear a specific item in it,
they'll be really mad if you don't talk about it.
When we're ready to start, Polly starts the recording and I keep my script in OneNote in the background
and I find this especially useful to make a strong start at the beginning of the webinar.
The start of the talk is the hardest part
so a strong confident start really makes a difference to the rest of the talk.
As we run through the agenda, I switch between my slides and demos as needed,
and when scheduled, I ask Polly to share any questions from the Q&A
and when it's time for a polling question I asked Polly to launch it.
Okay, so they are some lessons that we've learned running our webinars this year.
Let us know in the comments how yours have gone
and if you enjoyed the video then please like it and subscribe to the channel.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
[Music]