Coaching and development for the online world

One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies wanted to change the format of an annual scientific meeting from face to face to a webcast. They also wanted to take the opportunity to include more participants so that the total theoretical audience would be over 600. The presenters had little or no knowledge of presenting via webcast or of interacting with virtual audiences. We trained them for this new style.

Our first step was to help the speakers to make presentations that would work on  half of a small screen (the video of the presenter took up the remaining half screen of the webcast). The next step was to make sure that each presenter would be able to present to both a small local audience and multiple cameras simultaneously and take questions posted via the internet from around the globe. The presenters all ran major R&D programmes or departments with thousands of employees so the trainer had to make sure their time was used efficiently.

If webcasts are to work, presenters must know how to stimulate and manage interaction. We made sure that presenters knew how to manage polls, questions and comments.