Channel owner support

A webcast is an interactive, online audio/visual presentation (live or recorded) with audio and a synchronized PowerPoint presentation. Viewers can also ask questions and vote on relevant issues. BrightTALK™ Webcasts deliver the audio through the viewer’s computer, rather than requiring them to listen over a phone line.

BrightTALK takes the complexity out of managing an ongoing series of live and pre-recorded webcasts by consolidating them all into a single destination ‘channel’. It’s where you create webcasts and where your audience goes to see them.
All active channels are hosted in the BrightTALK website; however, you can and should embed your channel in your own website or blog. This can help boost your channel subscribers and live or on-demand webcast audiences.

They are viewers who have joined BrightTALK and subscribed to your channel to see your webcasts. They either came directly from the BrightTALK network or subscribed after being invited to attend by your marketing efforts. With the BrightTALK™ Basic Channel, you can see the detailed information about the subscribers you brought to your channel but not the information of the BrightTALK referral subscribers. To view this information you will need a BrightTALK™ Premium Channel or a BrightTALK™ Custom Channel.

No. Webcasts need to be created within a channel.

It’s entirely up to you! Some presentations lend themselves to particular structures. The look, feel, and approach adopted by channel owners vary enormously.

Webcasts can be scheduled for up to 120 minutes in length.

After you establish a channel, click the ’Schedule a Webcast’ button, and fill in the fields (help is available by clicking the ‘?’ icons). Once saved, the webcast is immediately scheduled. It’s that simple!

From your channel account, simply click ‘manage’ (located next to the listed webcast). The next screen will prompt you to add votes and slides.

Yes, Premium and Custom Channel owners can use the survey feature to add additional questions for your audience to answer. Survey questions can be added at the channel level (where the audience is prompted to answer the questions when they subscribe to your channel) and the webcast level (where your audience is prompted to answer the questions before they attend a specific webcast). The collected survey data can be downloaded into an Excel report.

You are responsible for the management of your channel and the webcasts that run in it. If you are not the webcast presenter, you must ensure that your presenters have the information (which is available in the webcast player) that they need to dial in and present. You are their contact.

You should brief the speakers on the deadlines for uploading their PowerPoint slides and adding any votes they wish to use during the presentation. When you schedule a webcast within your channel, the system will generate presenter instructions. It is your responsibility to email these instructions and to make sure the presenter has received and understood them.

Either, but you need to ensure these activities happen. Only one slide deck can be added for each webcast. For webcasts with a single presenter, slides can be added by you or the presenter. If there are multiple presenters, the individual presentations need to be combined into one deck and this ‘master deck’ needs to be uploaded. It is best to decide who will own loading the master deck. If you need to replace slides, you must upload a new PowerPoint presentation as you cannot replace individual slides. Your or your presenters have until 15 minutes before the webcast goes live to upload slides or add polls.

Absolutely! You can present directly from within your channel account.

Speakers can present from wherever there is a telephone and good Internet access. They do not need to be in the same physical location. There is, however, a limit of four dial-in telephone lines per live webcast. These lines can be shared by multiple speakers.

Yes. Simply schedule a normal webcast, but select practice/private instead of public. Since you won’t be promoting your practice webcast in your channel listings (or via the email service), there will be no external audience. This is a great way to get presenters comfortable with the webcasting process.

We have built our system to accommodate extremely large webcast audiences and have run many presentations with thousands of viewers. While we do not place restrictions on viewing numbers, please advise us if you are expecting over 2,000 live attendees.

Absolutely! Simply create additional channels from the ‘CreateWebcasts’ link at the top of every page if you want additional Basic or Premium Channels. Please contact us to discuss a Custom Channel and we will create one that fits your needs.

Yes. Live webcasts are archived automatically within 5 minutes of their conclusion.

As a channel owner you can edit the start and end points of the webcast and the timing of slide changes. You can also un-publish a webcast so it is no longer available for viewing.

If you cancel an upcoming webcast it will be removed from your channel listing. If you have enabled the email service for your channel, an automatic cancellation notification will be emailed to those subscribers that have pre-registered to attend this webcast.

Yes. Just go back into the webcast listing and change the start date and/or time. If you have enabled the email service for your channel, an automatic rescheduled notification email with be sent to those subscribers that have pre-registered to attend this webcast.

The best way to build an engaged audience is by putting effort into telling people about your relevant and timely webcasts in your channel. Your channel account has a ‘Promotion’ tab with features to help build your subscribers and webcast audiences, including:
1. Embed your channel: It is very important to embed your channel prominently on your website or blog. We’ve made it easy, and doing so means you will naturally drive subscribers to your channel. This feature increases traffic, leverages your webcast content and enhances your social media activities and your website.
2. BrightTALK email service: Email is an essential tool for attracting a live webcast audience. To reduce the complexity of sending well-timed reminder emails, each channel has a free and fully automatic email service. We encourage you to use the email service by keeping it active in the ‘Promotion’ section of your channel. See below for details on what kinds of emails are typically sent.
3. Invite your network: Here you can acquire a link to your webcast for your promotion and email marketing. You can also share the webcast using social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Basic, Premium and Custom Channel webcasts will be promoted in our BrightTALK portal. This means that notice of your upcoming, live, and recorded webcasts will reach a wide base of BrightTALK members who may decide to subscribe to your channel, if they are attracted to the content.
Your audience can also use BrightTALK’s social media features to promote your webcasts for you. They can easily connect to their own professional networks by emailing their contacts, posting to their social profiles and embedding your webcast into their own websites or blogs. Your audience will have these promotional tools during the 5 minute run-up to the live event, during the live event and during the on-demand version.

The BrightTALK email service includes the following types of emails:
- Subscription confirmation: emailed to each of your new channel subscribers.
- Weekly update: emailed to your channel subscribers and includes a list of your recent and/or upcoming webcasts.
- 24-hour reminder: emailed to pre-registrants 24 hours before the webcast is scheduled to start.
- ‘Starting now’ reminder: emailed to webcast pre-registrants 15 minutes before the start time.
- Recorded webcast notification: emailed to registered subscribers who had planned to attend an upcoming webcast but did not make it to the live day and time.
Please note that these emails are only sent to BrightTALK users that have agreed to receive them. If you don’t want your channel to benefit from the email service, simply un-select it on your ‘Promotion’ tab.

Yes. In fact, we strongly encourage you to. All forms of marketing will help you build the number of subscribers who attend your upcoming webcasts. Once an attendee has registered, the BrightTALK email service automatically does the reminder emailing. You should also consider continuing to market the event once it is completed since the on-demand version can attract 3-4 times the size of the live day audience.

Embedding your channel prominently on your webpage is a powerful way to attract viewers. The process of embedding is simple: we provide a short embed code that you pass to your webmaster for inclusion in one of your own web pages. You can generate the code in either html or Javascript. This is a one-time activity. Changes to your channel, such as newly scheduled webcasts, will automatically be reflected on your web page without further action needed from your web developers. Your embed code is available from the ‘Promotion’ tab in your channel account.

There are dozens of ways to run a successful channel - and you can bring your own style and approach. Visit the Online Events Academy to learn more about creating content, live presenting suggestions, how to bring an audience and more. Here are a few tips:
Take the time to promote. Attracting the right people to your channel is essential. Embed your channel prominently on your website. Be sure that you keep the email service switched on. Promote new upcoming webcasts in your own marketing activities.
Maintain a healthy calendar of upcoming webcasts. It’s good to have a schedule of upcoming webcasts in your channel. If you have several listed, you have a better chance of a visitor finding something interesting and you will have an active channel worth subscribing to.
Schedule events on a regular basis. Regular events makes it easier for your audience to get into the habit of participating in your webcasts - monthly, or even quarterly. Try to stick with the same time slot and book well in advance so you do not have any problems securing your preferred times.
Avoid cancelling webcasts. Cancelling dissuades viewers from coming to other events. Even if you don’t think your audience will be very large, run the webcast anyway because you will generate a valuable recording for the archive. Cancelling a webcast will negatively affect your channel rating - a key factor when subscribers are deciding whether to visit a new channel.
Add topic tags to webcasts. When you schedule a new webcast, fill out the ‘Tags’ field by adding specific and relevant keywords about the webcast. Specific keywords make your webcast easier to find within BrightTALK or on popular search engines.
Describe your channel: What kinds of topics do you discuss? What is your particular approach? Who runs the channel? Who should attend your webcasts? What industries do they cover? How often will you be running webcasts? All these questions should be answered in the channel description so prospective subscribers can make informed decisions about attending your webcasts.

Your webcast audience and presenter experience is not affected by the level of your channel. The key differences between a Basic, Premium and Custom Channel are:
Number of webcasts: With a Basic Channel you can present 12 webcasts a year. A Premium Channel allows you to present up to 25 webcasts a year. With a Custom Channel you can run unlimited webcasts.
Reports: Basic Channel owners can download audience information into an Excel report. Premium and Custom Channel owners receive this information as well as custom audience information from pre-event surveys. Custom Channel owners will also have the capability to track audience viewing habits and incorporate the analytics into their CRM systems.
Custom audience data: Premium and Custom Channels owners can add additional audience registration questions at both the channel level and at the webcast level using the survey feature.