Managing Webinars with CiviCRM

With the new reality of living with Covid-19, it is difficult to host in-person meetings. At Plastic Pollution Coalition, we used to host in-person coalition meetings in several cities as a way for people to learn and network with others in their community. In June, we transitioned to doing webinars. Although it's difficult for people to network during webinars, we can still continue sharing best practices and have a dialogue with our community. One advantage is that webinars are not limited to a specific geographic location, so more people can participate from around the world. We are also able to record the webinars, so they can be watched at a later time by others who may not be able to participate in the webinar itself.

Setting Up the Webinar Registration

When you sign up for a webinar or an online event using Zoom, GotoWebinar or many of these online meeting platforms, your data goes into these platforms. As a webinar organizer, you have to manually import the participant data into Civi. Instead of having people register using the meeting platform registration form, we would rather have people register for the webinar using a CiviCRM event registration form. Some platforms, like GotoWebinar, requires each person to sign up individually, which creates an unique individual login for them. In Zoom, you can create an event link with a password that you can share with registered participants. For this reason, we decided to use Zoom, and added the Zoom meeting link and the call-in number in the event confirmation email.

Using the CiviEvents Online Registration Form

When I created the Event in CiviCRM, I set up the online registration form, and also added some additional questions using a Profile. Instead of sending people to the standard Civi event form, we send people directly to the Civi online registration form. Here's the link to our upcoming webinar, so you can see what the registration page looks like. We add images and formatting by using Mosaico, and getting the html code from the public html page. Since we have people joining the webinar from around the world, we add the link to the TimeZone Converter on the registration page setting it to the local time when the event is happening, and people can select their city to see what time it will be happening where they are before signing up for the event. You can use this Event Link Generator, and add the link on your registration form.

Adding the Event to Your Calendar

Many of these meeting platforms include links in the confirmation email to easily add the event to your calendar. I was trying to figure out we can do something similar in Civi with iCal or something else. This may be possible to do in Civi, so please do share if you have found a work around for this. I wanted to give people an option to add the event to a Google calendar, Microsoft calendar or in the iphone calendar. I ended up creating a public Google calendar event, and adding calendar link in the confirmation email.

Sending an Event Confirmation Email

We create a custom Message Template for the webinar with the link to add the event to the calendar, the Zoom link and other meeting details. When someone signs up for the event, we use a Civirule to trigger the event confirmation email. Here's the Civirule.

Tracking Registrations in a Report

We create an Event Report to track all the registrations. We ask people about how they heard about the webinar, and also ask them to share questions ahead of the webinar, so we can share these with the event presenters.

Getting Feedback from Webinar Participants

After the event, we send out a Thank you email with a link to a feedback survey we created using a Civi Profile. This data is helpful for us to see how we can improve our webinars, and get ideas and suggestions of topics people are interested in. Here's the link to the survey we created for the June webinar.

Please Share Your Tips & Questions

Please comment below to share your tips and questions. Thank you!