What to look for in a webinar platform and how to make it work best for your goals

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the lives of everyone throughout the world. Everyday activities like going to work, school, or the grocery store stopped, and we all had to adjust our lives to the (temporary) “new normal”. That meant that industries had to adjust and offer virtual, contactless, and alternative options when possible. At GAAP Dynamics, webinars emerged as a crucial component of the learner journey and continues to be today.

Because webinars have become such an important piece of our business, our team is dedicated to offering the best learner experience possible. In the latter part of 2023, we decided to take a look at the webinar platform we were currently using, and analyze whether or not it was the best we could offer our learners. The answer was no.

For the next four months, our team searched for a new webinar platform that would better suit both our facilitators and learners. We asked everyone in our company what features they thought were most important for our next webinar platform to have, and used that data to create a checklist for comparing different platforms. We were able to identify five areas of importance or significance where we wanted to maintain functionality or improve quality. Here is what we learned and some tips you can also use when finding a webinar platform.

1. Audience engagement tools

Audience engagement tools play a crucial role in a successful webinar production, enhancing the overall experience for both presenters and attendees. These tools enable presenters to interact with their audience, encourage active participation, and maintain interest throughout the session. For our team in particular, we wanted to make sure our learners had the access to tools such as an audience chat to ask questions and discuss ideas, a hand raise feature to show participation, an interactive tool to submit polling questions, and the ability to allow breakout rooms.

By promoting interaction and collaboration, these tools not only enrich the learning experience but also contribute to increased retention and comprehension of the learning material. Ultimately, we found that audience engagement tools are essential for creating an impactful virtual learning experience.

2. Scheduling

Not every aspect sought in a new webinar platform needs to be groundbreaking. Sometimes it's about gaining access to basic functions previously unavailable. For our team, this included the ability to add an event to your calendar upon registration confirmation.

While seemingly minor, this feature greatly aids webinar attendance by ensuring learners remember when the event is happening! Providing a simple method for adding events to calendars, along with a strong email workflow, promotes and increases webinar attendance.

3. Multimedia elements

Incorporating multimedia elements such as slides, diagrams, graphics, and videos into webinars can help emphasize key points and learning objectives, making the content more memorable and understandable. You can also add these elements as downloadable resources for learners to take with them post webinar and study on their own.

Additionally, multimedia elements cater to different learning styles, ensuring that information is conveyed effectively to diverse audiences. GAAP Dynamics has a very diverse range of learners that span across different generations, countries, languages, industries, and more! Integrating multimedia elements enriches the quality of the webinar across the spectrum.

4. Reporting

A key aspect of our webinar offerings involves providing Continuing Professional Education (CPE) eligible webinars for our learners, which requires a robust and precise reporting and analytics system. Compliance with criteria established by NASBA is essential for learners to earn CPE credits. Therefore, accurately analyzing and documenting all learner interactions that meet these criteria is non-negotiable. For our webinar platform transition, we aimed to ensure easy sorting and searchability of these elements.

The webinar platform we ended up choosing also has a very interesting feature that allows the CPE certificate to be generated automatically (at the end of the webinar) based on the criteria we establish on the backend of the event. This allows us to save some time during our post-production workflow.

Additionally, some of our webinars serve marketing purposes, aiming to reach broader audiences and gauge their preferences, likes, and dislikes. Detailed reporting facilitates data-driven decisions, helping us to refine future webinar strategies and content, and enhance the overall performance of our events.

5. Overall learner experience

Here at GAAP Dynamics we believe that we offer best-in-class accounting training. When we decided to find a new webinar platform, we wanted it to compliment the quality of our training and overall brand and offer a best-in-class webinar experience as well. Our number one goal is to curate the best learner experience possible from start to finish.

We wanted the learner console to be user friendly and easily navigated. An intuitive user interface allows learners to move through the webinar more efficiently focusing their attention on the content rather than technical hurdles. We also wanted to have options to make elements of the webinar more accessible for learners that need additional tools such as closed captions and live transcription.

Ultimately, prioritizing the learner experience in webinars creates a positive and impactful learning environment, which makes it more likely that learners come back for future sessions!

If you are looking to change webinar platforms or create a webinar division within your company, you need to first understand what it is you have to offer the audience and why it sets you apart from others in your industry. Choose a platform that emphasizes that, and make sure it contains tools and elements that compliment your overall value proposition. For us, Best-in-class training increases knowledge, improves quality, and builds trust, sums up our goals and guidelines for why we chose ON24 as our new webinar platform going forward.

If you’d like to see us in action, register for our upcoming webinar, SAS 145 is here! Are you ready? Top 5 considerations for audit teams. The webinar is FREE and takes place on April 18th at 11:00 ET, and is CPE-eligible!

We look forward to seeing you there and showing off everything we’ve learned throughout the process of changing webinar platforms!

About GAAP Dynamics  

We’re a DIFFERENT type of accounting training firm. We don’t think of training as a “tick the box” exercise, but rather an opportunity to empower your people to help them make the right decisions at the right time. Whether it’s U.S. GAAP training, IFRS training, or audit training, we’ve helped thousands of professionals since 2001. Our clients include some of the largest accounting firms and companies in the world. As lifelong learners, we believe training is important. As CPAs, we believe great training is vital to doing your job well and maintaining the public trust. We want to help you understand complex accounting matters and we believe you deserve the best training in the world, regardless of whether you work for a large, multinational company or a small, regional accounting firm. We passionately create high-quality training that we would want to take. This means it is accurate, relevant, engaging, visually appealing, and fun. That’s our brand promise. Want to learn more about how GAAP Dynamics can help you? Let’s talk!

Disclaimer  

This post is published to spread the love of GAAP and provided for informational purposes only. Although we are CPAs and have made every effort to ensure the factual accuracy of the post as of the date it was published, we are not responsible for your ultimate compliance with accounting or auditing standards and you agree not to hold us responsible for such. In addition, we take no responsibility for updating old posts, but may do so from time to time.