In this article, I want to share with you the technical mistakes I've made running webinars, how to avoid them and also share the few tools I've tried so far for running webinars.

A bit of backstory first

This year, I've taken an active role in the Swiss Service Design Network (SDN). The promise I made to myself is to have at least one event per month. As anyone else, life was already pretty full before that decision, so it became clear that hosting these events remotely would be the quickest approach in terms of logistics.

So, after hosting seven webinars for the Swiss SDN and previously hosting a few webinars for the Swiss Innovation Academy, I made a few mistakes dumb mistakes that I'll list here so that you can avoid them when you start organising your first webinar.

The mistakes I made when hosting webinars

Forgot to click record: Yes, that happened. In fact it happened in the webinar AI and Service Design, and that's why there is only a written summary for that one.

Now I either set the event as record by default in Zoom, or have a huge text in my checklist for the event saying: "Hit record".

Didn't set the mics to be off by default

How fun is it to suddenly hear someone speaking with his mom in the middle of a conversation with a guest? Not at all, I know but that's what happened in the webinar "An Early History Of Service Design In Switzerland".

Since then I've changed the default settings of Zoom so that when people join their mic is automatically off.

Clicked the go live button too early and ended up with no webinar

This was back when I did the webinars using restream. to do webinars for the Swiss Innovation Academy.

I was in restream early and clicked by mistake the live button, as it was too early I quickly clicked to stop the live. What I didn't know was that when you do so, the live is totally finished and you can't restart it. At least that's what happened. So the webinar just didn't happen. And I recorded it all by myself speaking just to the camera with no interaction from the crowd. Not fun at all.

Forgot to put the waiting room on

Guests come 30 minutes before the start time in the webinar so that we check the mics and I remind them about how things will happen.

Now imagine that you're having that conversation and suddenly someone joins and says hello. Yeah, that happened too. Don't underestimate that people can come way early.

If I remember well that happened just before the webinar "Storytelling and Service Design a primer" with Romain Pittet.

Now in Zoom, I've set up that the waiting room is on by default, and it's only when we're ready with the guest that we take it off.

Put the speaker on highlight

I didn't know that when you put the speak in "highlight mode" in Zoom, it messes with the recording. So in the recording, you will only see that person, even if me the host, I'm speaking it won't show my face but the face of the guest listening.

That's why in the webinar “Setting the scene with Service Design” with Emmanuel Fragnière there are moments where you just a photo of my face instead of the video (and my god, that took a lot of extra editing time).

The tools I've tried so far

• Whereby: I loved it because there was no app to install and the experience was super simple. I stopped using it, because the recording wasn't usable as it was just a screencast of the full app and I had to spend hours cutting out all the interface parts that were unnecessary.

• Restream: I've used that to do live streamings, it was great as it allowed me to have the webinar directly on youtube and LinkedIn. I've stopped using it as the setup process was a bit long, and because I couldn't have a moment where people could join with their camera, just chat.

• Zoom: At the moment I'm using zoom because the recording is not too bad (not great either), it works well with Lu.ma the tool I use to register people, and it's a tool that most people know how to use. Zoom is also great because it allows us to have a "hang-out" moment that isn't recorded at the end of the webinar, where we can have cameras and mics open and just "hang out". I'm looking for another tool than Zoom because the recording quality isn't great.

Written on Saturday 23d of September 2023, by Daniele Catalanotto