Recently as part of a project funded by Historic England, I had the experience of developing, writing and delivering a series of five Webinars on Commercial Skills for Heritage Venues. The aim was to make them deliverable during Covid-19 lockdown to help venues in their recovery process, so the obvious route to follow was the Webinar. 

Although I had considerable experience of writing and delivering training through standard live presentations, this was a very new medium for me and something of a step into the unknown. The writing of the script proved relatively straight forward as it differed little from a standard training script, it was the technology and marketing that delivered the surprises and learning curves.

To begin with choosing a platform to deliver it on. I was already familiar with a couple as an attendee and Zoom seemed an obvious choice to me. However, there is a world of difference between being an attendee at zoom meeting and using it to deliver webinars. To begin with there was the cost implication as to fully use Zoom as a webinar platform for more than 25 guests required subscribing to their professional version which worked out at £52.00 per month. This seemed a lot, but it did open up a world of tools I could use. The platform itself is fairly easy to navigate around when setting up webinars and recording them once you`ve mastered the set-up pages and Zoom very helpfully have webinars online to teach you how to do this.

The next problem I faced was advertising the free webinars and ticketing them as they were limited to 100 per webinar, and I wanted a way of researching the audience. My own and Historic England`s networks were really useful for getting the word out using social media, but I also decided to pay for a three week run of e-adverts on the Museum Association web site to increase the reach. Here I found another new challenge. I have written adverting script but never designed an advert including graphics before and had a noticeably short deadline so a very rough learning curve especially around sizing to fit specific space. However, using Adobe Spark and with some editing from Paint 3D and after a lot of trail and error I produced a top banner that worked and went out 3 days a week for 3 weeks and was very successful. The banner was linked to the Eventbrite booking page so clicking on sent viewers straight there.

So, the logistics of webinars sorted it now came to the delivery. I had planned for wider accessibility reasons that they would be recorded and available for free with a transcript on my web site. This proved a sound idea and they actually had more viewings than the live version by a ratio of 3:1. The site provider Ionos also provide good analytics to show hits on the webinars recordings. 

Each webinar was designed to last approximately one hour including a question and answer session, but “after delivery of the first session on “The Retail Experience” it became obvious that this format was not only exhausting for me but also the audience, so following this session I had a redesign of the scripts to include more question and answer breaks and information exchanges to make the sessions more interactive and lively, and this was a real improvement and certainly something I would recommend. I chose to use a simple standard icon design for the presentation graphics that I thought would be sharp yet clean and not too distracting for a webinar.   

However, I learned and grew more confident with each webinar presented, and by the final one had mastered my way around using Zoom to host a large gathering on my own. The feedback has been really pleasing and the webinars well received from a large and diverse group of historic venues and attractions from across the whole country and abroad which I was a little surprised but pleased by. They certainly met my original aim and have given me the confidence and skills to develop more webinars going forward.