TRC Online Meeting Blog: April 2014 Archives

Registration for your webinar is complete. The date for the webinar is near, and any technical surprises on the day of the event will compromise the success of your webinar. You need to understand the technical restrictions of your web conferencing platform and be trained on the software. During the content planning phase, you should have communicated any restrictions to presenters so they understand the technical requirements regarding materials they will be using. You should have enough bandwidth to avoid buffering and presentation delays. You want to maximize the audio quality, following a few simple recommendations:

• Use a handset if possible (otherwise a headset)
• Don't use a speaker phone
• Be on a landline, not a mobile phone
• Consider background noise
• When a speaker is not presenting, mute their lines

Whether you need to host recurring meetings or organize something last minute, setting up a conference call efficiently allows you to bring people together. Although conference calls make meeting convenient, they can get complicated when you involve multiple people.

There are many things that can negatively impact a conference call, such as background noise or interruption by late participants. You can also face the issue of people having the wrong dial-in info or bad connectivity to the call.

Know Your Conference Call Provider's Features and Options

Hosting a successful conference call is much more manageable if you make yourself familiar with all of the features and options available in order to alleviate any issues that may arise. For instance, you can mute all participants in order to avoid background noise. You can even lock your conference so that late participants don't have the option to join and interrupt. If a participant has an issue dialing in to the call, you can actually dial out to him/her for inclusion into the call. Another option is to record the call for people who may have missed the meeting all together. It is also helpful to notify participants of how you plan to conduct the meeting by sending an email ahead of time with an agenda and details of how you plan to conduct the meeting, such as your plan to lock the conference 5 minutes after the meeting starts.

A Webinar is an online presentation and communication tool for your target audience. It is cost-effective and can be highly beneficial to your organization if properly planned. Benefits include: