The Power of the Webinar: Engaging Large Virtual Audiences with Natural History

Since the coronavirus pandemic, the world of virtual events has grown significantly. Many natural history organisations have seized the opportunity to engage bigger and more diverse audiences and continue to do so alongside the traditional in-person training and engagement activities that have now recommenced. This presentation will explore the pros and cons of using webinars to engage with audiences and delve into case studies from the FSC BioLinks project, London Natural History Society and entoLIVE. We’ll explore some of the do’s and don’ts for delivering natural history content virtually and discuss the next steps for engaging large virtual audiences.

Q&A with Keiron Derek Brown

Keiron Derek Brown has been running the National Earthworm Recording Scheme since its launch in 2014. He has been working as a biological recording professional since 2017 when he joined the Field Studies Council to develop and deliver the FSC BioLinks invertebrate recording project. Following the completion of this project, Keiron set up the Biological Recording Company to support the environmental sector through training and consultancy.

How much does it cost to set up and run a webinar series?
This is something that people always underestimate/ For the FSC BioLinks webinars we covered the costs through the project budget (and I’d estimate is costs 10s of thousands to run those webinars). entoLIVE has a budget of around £6,000 per year (/20 webinars) to cover all costs, including my staff time, contracting webinar assistants, paying speaker fees, marketing, Zoom and Eventbrite. What you put into a webinar series determines what you get out of it! entoLIVE gets the large numbers that I have reported because of the amount of resources that is put into running the programme. I’m always happy to discuss collaboration on webinars with other organisations and invite anyone interested to contact me at info@biologialrecording.co.uk. I’ve built up an audience that potential collaborators from benefit from if they partner with me on a webinar series.
Do you recommend Eventbrite for managing both paid and free events?
This depends on what facilities your own organisation has to list events, manage bookings and take payments. Eventbrite did introduce a tiered subscription system that added significant cost to managing your events through their platform, even if your events were free to attend. Eventbrite also charges fees on ticket sales, impacting how much of the sales go to the event organiser (I incorporate these fees into my pricing rather than using the option for the customer to pay these as an additional cost at checkout). Due to the high number of events that I organise and the marketing tools that Eventbrite offers, I find that this pricing structure still made it worthwhile for me to run my events through their platform. Furthermore, analysis of my sales indicates that around 50% of my bookings come through Eventbrite-based marketing. I’m pleased to say that Eventbrite has now gone back on this decision to charge for hosting free events and they’ve reduced their subscription rates for using the marketing tools. In my opinion, the platform is good value for money again. One thing that has disappointed me has been their customer service as I’ve experienced several technical issues that they’ve failed to resolve or communicate with me about.
Do any of your events have interactive elements aside from the speaker Q&A segments?
The interactive components of the webinars that I currently run are the speaker Q&A segments and use of the Zoom chat feature. During the FSC BioLinks webinars we actively encouraged our speakers to include interactive elements such as polls. These were good for encouraging more interaction with attendees, but caused frustration for some users who struggled to participate in them and they are not relevant to viewers of the recordings when the video is replayed. I find that the bigger the audience, the harder it is to incorporate a wider variety of interactive elements. The webinars and virtual symposiums are just one part of the overall natural history training that the Biological Recording Company provides, sitting alongside our Invertebrate Study Days, Field Recorder Days and I’ll be launching self-study training courses with a number of different interactive elements very soon.
How do you evaluate the impact of your webinars?
Monitoring and evaluation was a key component of the FSC BioLinks project and we surveyed participants, spoke to stakeholders and contracted external evaluators to assess our work. All of the documentation for the FSC BioLinks project is available via Applied Ecology Resources. For entoLIVE, I wanted to ensure that I have evidence to back up any claims that I make about the programme making a difference and I publish this via the entoLIVE Summary Report. I use a range of methods to gather the data that I need for evaluation, including logging engagement stats, surveying attendees and engaging with stakeholders.