New Commandment Men’s Ministries BlogBeats Flying United: My Take on Using Webinars to Teach Men’s Team Ministry
Moving ministry training online brought technical problems, unexpected audience ratings, improvised equipment, and plenty of humor. Reflecting on his early webinars, Herb Reese describes what worked, what failed, and how he encouraged viewers to stay. This historical account captures an experiment in teaching men’s team ministry without constant airline travel.
Read the full post: Beats Flying United: My Take on Using Webinars to Teach Men’s Team Ministry
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3 thoughts on “Beats Flying United: My Take on Using Webinars to Teach Men’s Team Ministry”
Hi Herb. I was a recent attendee of your webinar (last Thursday, 4/20) and I thought it went pretty well. A few times the video/audio went out of sync, but overall the quality was quite good. Yeah, the bribery worked 😉 and I stayed to the end, although I’d like to think that I would have stayed to the end regardless. I recall some kind of dark spot on the wall to your left that was a bit visually distracting, but maybe that’s just me. A ficus or something green and living in the background might be pleasant.
The GoToWebinar site defines attentiveness as “Percent of time the GoToWebinar Viewer is the primary window on the attendee’s screen”. I wonder how that works for multi-monitor users like myself? I had your presentation in full screen viewing mode on my primary monitor the whole time, but I also had your PDF handouts open in Adobe Acrobat on my secondary monitor. If the Acrobat application has the focus (is the selected window), does that mean GoToWebinar thinks I’m off doing something else and therefore not attentive? I probably stayed with the presentation itself 98% to 99% (not saying that just to get the DVD, I’m actually curious as to how accurate/valuable that metric really is in all cases).
The content itself was very compelling, and it’s a subject that I have been giving some thought to as of late. There were also a number of great take away quotes, my favorite being that the incarnation was not a short-term mission trip. And the story about the single mom at the restaurant where the group was meeting was very touching; it was a great example of lifestyle evangelism (not to mention being a bit tissue-worthy).
Yep, I saw the mark on the wall too, Keith. I fixed it for later presentations that week. I’m moving my webinar to a permanent location, since I need to actually use my chest of drawers for its normal purpose. We’ll see how well I do with my next set design.
Your attentiveness score was 82, Keith. You tied with Ron from Washington State for the highest. John from Michigan, your score was 54. You can keep your DVD, but let’s step it up a notch next time, K?
I don’t know if “tissue-worthy” is a great metric for men’s ministry, but I’ll take it anyway.
Herb
I received this great comment via email. I’m posting it without attribution: “Thank you for putting on the webinar, there were 3 of us watching and we each enjoyed it very much. It gave me some definition to what we have been doing over the last couple of years and inspiration to keep on keeping on. We have about 25 widow ladies that we contact each month and end up with 7-8 projects from those calls, which is good because we have only 5-6 guys on a good Saturday to serve them however I have noticed that God has been faithful in providing for the our needs and the widows needs through that. What you explained in your webinar concerning identifying with and how that happens and the need for commitment and sacrifice is what I have seen happening so it was nice to see your defining that process and the need for it. Do you have or have you considered doing a 20-25 minute promo video of sorts that includes the why do widows ministry and the identify,commitment and sacrifice part of the process. I want to use some of the webinar as a recruitment tool but getting it down to 20 minutes will be hard to do. I like your computer stand.*:) “