Q: We conduct education webinars that we produce for our learners. I have been asked to cut costs for webinars by cutting the assist portion of the webinar for our presenters. They are being asked to manage the webinar themselves. I need a resource for best practice or current practice in this area. Our presenters feel this is unreasonable. I cannot afford to lose my SME’s over this, but if it should be expected of them, I just need to know. Thanks for any help that you can provide.

A: LERN strongly recommends that you have a webinar assistant to support your presenters. While I would not go so far as to say it is "unreasonable" for presenters to manage their own webinar, it is more demanding for the presenter. LERN consultants present many webinars, and some of our consultants have no problems with doing their own management. Others would not be able to handle the software, set up, assurance of accuracy of display of slides, audio, etc., and no matter how much they might know about their subject matter, they are not able to do their own webinar management. Increasingly, programs are not considering webinars to be a source of revenue from registrations, but rather, look at webinars as a tool for drawing people in to other programs they offer. Because so many webinars are free, it is sometimes hard to get people to pay the level of fee you might want to charge.

This might be something you could do on a case by case basis, recognizing that the presenter may be a genius in her or his subject matter, but may not know how to manage the audio controls in a piece of webinar software. A greater concern for your institution than the money you would save by eliminating the assist portion of the webinar, would be the money you might lose if the quality of the presentation goes down, if there are technical problems the presenter cannot handle, if the presenter cannot manage to field all the questions while focusing on the presentation, etc. Here is a link to a publication that you might find useful: http://ithemes.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/05/15-Best-Practices-webinars-eBook.pdf

LERN recommend looking at other ways to cut costs, or at ways to generate more income, such as having upcoming webinars promoted at the end of each one that is presented. Thanks for asking. Please let us know if you have any further questions. (By the way, we have 5 consultants at LERN who regularly present webinars, including myself. Only one of our presenters feels confident enough to manage his own webinar).