What’s the Optimum Length for a Webinar?

OR What If You Held a Three-Hour Webinar and Nobody Stayed?

Third Sector New England is offering a new training series to help nonprofits navigate the economic downturn — and use this time of change to decide if they need to retool and refocus their strategic direction. The trainings, which are three hours in length, are being offered for free to people anywhere in the country.

Therefore, we are offering these sessions as both an in-person opportunity and as a hybrid webinar or conference call. Obviously, webinars are rarely more than an hour in length. So we are grappling with how to:

• Make this venture affordable for us (as the minute plan could break the bank quickly).
• More important, make the webinar experience useful, educational and enjoyable for remote participants.
• Make sure the remote feature adds to and does not detract from the experience for in-person attendees.

Have any of you dealt with turning a long training workshop into a shorter webinar or call-in experience for remote participants? How have you structured these trainings, so that the remote folks could sign off in a place that gave them a fulfilling experience and caused the least disruption for the presenter and in-person participants?

Or have you found that people were willing to participate for a two- or three-hour training?
I look forward to your insights.

Third Annual Be the Media Mini-Conference

Challenges and Opportunities in the Age of
New Media for Grassroots Organizations

The annual Be the Media Mini-Conference will help participants understand the link between strategic communications and organizing strategies as well as learn more about essential communications tools and techniques.

Date: Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Time: 9 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. (lunch provided)
Location: NonProfit Center
Cost: $15 – $35 sliding scale, includes lunch
Sponsored by: Progressive Communicators Network and Third Sector New England
Co-sponsored by: Project Think Different, Boston Women’s Fund, Resist and Press Pass TV

Communications and media work are powerful tools for organizers and nonprofits working on community and social issues, but they can also present challenges, particularly for under-resourced groups.

In recent years, the development of new media tools such as social networking sites, blogs with multi-media content, YouTube and cell phones as mass communication devices have both given groups more options and raised questions about where to focus already limited staff and volunteer time. At this year’s conference, we will explore not only how to implement these tools, but identify what are their best and most impactful uses for grassroots organizations.

The conference is designed to serve change makers at levels of communication experience including those who are doing communications work as part of their current positions, such as organizers, executive directors or policy advocates.

Massachusetts nonprofit social media survey

Being very interested in how nonprofits are using social media ourselves, we’d like to pass along a survey whose results we look forward to seeing.

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Talance is launching the Massachusetts Nonprofit Social Media Survey, whose objective is to gauge how Massachusetts nonprofits are using social media.

The results will help delineate where nonprofits fall in social media adoption rates, how that varies (for example by the size of the org), and what kind of benefits they’re receiving from their efforts. The findings will provide solid practical value for nonprofits that want to benchmark their own practices.

The survey will be open until Nov. 21, 2008.

Anyone can receive a free executive summary of the survey results when they become available this winter. Every organization that submits a completed survey will receive a complimentary copy of the full survey report, available in February.