5 Keys to a successful live-streamed Zoom webinar

This past Thursday, I had the pleasure of significantly challenging myself by serving as the technical "director" (behind-the-scenes tech operator) for IABC London's live-streamed Virtuoso Awards Celebration on Zoom. It was easily the most complicated and detail-focused hour of work I've done in a long time - with the added pressure that +100 eyes were all on screen watching my every action: one wrong mouse click and I could have disrupted the whole experience.

It went off without a hitch!

But what looked seamless and polished for the viewers on the other side of the broadcast masked more than two weeks of preparation and careful rehearsing. I learned a lot about the experience through the planning. Here are my top tips

Tips To Make Your Zoom Webinar Live-Streamed Event Seamless

1. Rehearse - Zoom webinars are very different from meetings. For one thing, the viewers don't have the ability to share their video/you can't see them. You're really "presenting" a show to them. So make it polished for them... think of it like a TV show. I thought of the Virtuoso Awards like the Oscars - what did we want to broadcast to our viewers. With that in mind the team and I rehearsed at least four separate times before our live broadcast to play with the many unique features of Zoom Webinar add-on and pick exactly what ways we wanted to present our show... when we would have a full-screen PowerPoint or video, when we would switch speaker views or spotlight different speakers, and which parts of chat or Q&A or polls we would enable for the viewers. Every single time we rehearsed we made different decisions or uncovered better ways of implementing the various features within Zoom, until we felt ready for a dress rehearsal. We then had a volunteer view the dress rehearsal as an attendee/viewer so that we could confirm that the end-users experience would be polished and smooth. To do this, I saved our webinar as a template and copied it into a separate non-advertised webinar so that we could do a real run-through exactly as the viewers would see upon going live.
2. Have a script - our Virtuoso Awards show had many complicated elements: two hosts who alternated speaking roles, a PowerPoint, various videos we would broadcast, polls, chat, two surprise speakers we'd have to promote to panellists at just the right moment - the announcement of winners that we didn't want to spoil the surprise for! Having a script that we followed to the 't' was essential: it allowed me to know exactly which buttons to push at the right time.
3. Have a host(s), PowerPoint/image/video/screen share lead separate from the technical director - you can't do it all! I decided early on that I had to limit my role to literally being the tech director pushing buttons and operating the behind-the-scenes view. I was backed by an incredibly competent team of 5 who ran the "on-stage" visible part of the show. This allowed me to keep my desktop view within Zoom intact without losing any of the control views, as would have happened if I'd shared my screen. Therefore, we had a separate host focus on screen sharing the PowerPoint and videos, the speakers focused on hosting the event - and I just pressed all the buttons at the right time. It made everyone's life much easier.
4. Start the webinar in full-screen with some sort of welcome screen or countdown - we elected to use the option of simulcasting to Facebook Live. I wanted a polished and professional introduction and no awkward moments when viewers were just hanging there waiting for me to start the Facebook broadcast. So, my solution was to have a welcome/greeting/countdown screen - before pressing 'broadcast' on the webinar and going live to viewers, I entered screen share of my QuickTime video window and pressed pause on it, so that viewers were greeted with the "we'll begin in a moment" message as seen at the top of this article. This allowed me to then tinker away behind the scenes on publishing to Facebook and confirming everything was set up, before I hit 'play' on the video and counted down to the start of the script.
5. Have a separate "emergency troubleshooting" chat - this was a solution our team thought of mere moments before we went live, and it saved us! We realized that the Zoom chat would be dominated by the viewers themselves to engage with the broadcast... so we couldn't rely on it to share emergency troubleshooting messages to the hosts/panellists. Therefore, our team shared our text numbers in case of a disaster and initiated a private Facebook Messenger group chat right before we went live. This allowed us to cheer each other on, tell us we'd forgot to unmute a particular video or speaker, and course-correct during the live broadcast without our viewers knowing we were tweaking anything.

The result was a very smooth presentation!

But, it wasn't PERFECT. And that's my final tip: don't expect perfection. It's live, after all!

Reach out or comment if you have any questions or tips of your own - and good luck with your live webinar!