WHAT ARE THE COSTS INVOLVED IN RUNNING A WEBINAR

Internet technology has paved the way for the birth of non-traditional modes of education and training like distance learning and webinars. While distance learning has long been introduced into the educational system, webinars or web-based seminars are just beginning to gain popularity. Webinars take learning to a higher step because these allow lecturers to conduct lectures, presentations, workshops or seminars to an audience who may be in different cities or countries simultaneously through the internet, thus, eliminating learning barriers like distance and culture.

With the increasing acceptance of webinars nowadays, more and more individual or corporate educators, lecturers, trainers are taking advantage of its benefits.  However, although webinars are generally less costly than the traditional seminars on locations, these also would entail some costs for the organizer. The common areas in which costs will be incurred are services, technology and promotion.

Service costs refer to the payment that you will incur in case you decide to hire the services of a webinar planner or organizer. If you do not want to bother with the little details in the planning and execution of the seminar and opt to just show up on schedule and conduct the lecture or presentation, then getting a service provider that would take care of all these details will be the right thing to do. For this, you should expect to shell out at least $1000. It would cost you less if you do not get full services like if you do the planning yourself and hire a technical assistant or a facilitator to assist you during the actual webinar.

The next area where you will definitely have to spend on is, of course, technology. Free web conferencing services are available but attendance to webinars that are transmitted through these services are limited only to a maximum of 20 people. If you want the webinar to have the greatest impact, you will need a bigger audience than that.

The choice of doing a live webinar or a recorded one will affect how much you will spend because the latter would cost less. Both of these webinar types, in order to be effective, should provide opportunities for the audience to interact with the lecturer and participate in the discussion. This would entail telephone conferencing and chat rooms among others. Web conference platforms may either charge a monthly or annual fee or on a per person per minute basis. Depending on how large the audience and how interactive the webinar is, costs on technology may range from $100 to $3000.

Promotion is also another aspect that would require cost depending on what methods you choose. Press releases, search and banner advertisements or email invitations are just some of the options that you can avail of if you want your webinar to be known by your target market. You can spend as low as $100 to as high as $20,000 for this.

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