Tip 20 – Find your Webinar champions

It may come as a shock to you, as it did to me, but you might not be the only person in your organisation who can host Webinars.
That’s clearly a joke but just because you do host most or all of the Webinars for your organisation doesn’t mean that you should.

I once worked in big team of e-learning specialists. We
procured and introduced the Webinar software and then built up confidence across the organisation in how to use it. We developed approaches to massive webinars and small meetings and my team hosted them all.

However, as time went on we quickly realised that we didn’t have the capacity to run all the Webinars the organisation needed. We needed to come up with a different way of supporting our colleagues because keeping the skills exclusive to our team was unsustainable.

We tried to train as many people as we could – but soon we couldn’t keep up with the demand for individual training.

We started to wonder if we were the only ones with the desire to host Webinars or to train colleagues. Who else was there in the organisation?

So we asked all staff to nominate someone in their team who was keen to get involved with hosting and training others how to host Webinars. These were our’ Webinar Champions’.

Our new ‘Campions’ were not necesarily those already skilled in technical work, they were just people who wanted to learn – who were excited about the possibilities of Webinars.

Rather than trying to train lots of people with the basic skills, we trained just a few to a high level and relied on them to cascade the skills to their teams. They became the Webinar experts for that team.

This meant that:

• The organisation could maximise the effectiveness of time and money spent on training
• We trained colleagues who were keen to learn and highly motivated, not intimidated by the technology or only there because they had to be
• ‘Fresh pairs of eyes’ were able to improve the organisation’s approach to Webinars by seeing things from their own, different angle and concentrating on their own team’s needs or differing audience
• Webinar Champions were given great CPD and became seen as experts

Overall…

…whatever the size of your organisation, take the time to find your Webinar Champions and start spreading Webinar skills. The more people understand and can help to develop the use of Webinars, the more the organisation can use online events to help to achieve its goals.

Creative Commons image credit: Tim Green aka atoach | Copyright music credit (used by permission): Mike Murphy