Webcasts Connect Far-Flung Businesses with Success Strategies
You work 90 hours a week to keep a business you started alive. You provide employment to 20 people in an area that has far more job-seekers than opportunities. You hunger for advice to become more efficient and increase the chances that you’ll still be in business next year.
Unfortunately, you’re located in a tiny town in a remote corner of North Dakota.
Help is closer than you think, thanks to a federal assistance program, Web conferencing and a savvy Albuquerque, New Mexico, company.
Strategic & Learning Services (SLS) designed and delivers skill-based learning programs for small businesses nationwide through a contract with the Small Business Administration (SBA). That agency offers what is known as 7(j) training (named for a section of the law that created the agency) to help small, disadvantaged businesses improve their competitiveness and fulfill federal procurement needs. Those businesses qualify for “set-aside” opportunities on government contracts through the Section 8(a) program.
“The SBA contracted the development of the course to increase the success rate of companies as they transitioned from the nine-year 8(a) program,” Chris Rodke, a project specialist for SLS explains.
SLS earned the contract to deliver that training, and began to offer workshops all over the U.S. The objective of the workshop was to provide the participants with a “real-world” appreciation of how decisions, people and deals might dictate the business’ success or failure. “We traveled to 46 cities, and held 52 workshops over the course of the contract. In addition, 5,800 DVDs of the workshop were produced,” says Rodke.
A Broader Reach
While training sessions in a city the size of Los Angeles allowed SLS to reach a large number of companies at once, they also had a responsibility to serve business owners in far-flung locations.
“There were a lot of unserved markets out there if we were to provide only workshops in person. Many small business owners in rural areas would have had difficulty attending,” he recalls. “From the government’s standpoint, a solution was needed to provide access to folks everywhere.”
While the DVD the company produced summarized the training and was distributed by the SBA, it lacked the back-and-forth audience involvement that makes the in-person programs such a big success.
Having online seminars seemed to be a natural solution, so the SLS staff sought out technology that would allow them to deliver programs over the Internet. They found one of the more well-known Web-based solutions and set up an elaborate conference, complete with full-motion video.
“We were disappointed with the results,” Rodke recalls. “We discovered that the technology really depended on the lowest common denominator as far as Internet bandwidth was concerned. For a lot of folks, the full-motion video came out choppy. There were a lot of delays in forwarding the slides, too.”
One of the company’s associates discovered a better way. “Infinite Conferencing’s solution was just what we needed,” Rodke recalls. “The technology and the whole structure of support from the Infinite Conferencing side really allowed the facilitator of the event to just focus on the content and delivery.”
No Delays With Infinite Conferencing
Instead of trying to download special plug-ins or configure their connections, participants logged right in and started learning.
“The closest thing to an issue was pop-up blockers. If participants didn’t have their pop-up blockers disabled, they weren’t able to participate in the interactive surveys that were part of the presentation,” Rodke says.
SLS addressed that by sending advance email spelling out the steps needed to change the settings on participants’ Web browsers. “During the events, we had a technical person on hand to answer questions, and we had the Infinite Conferencing technical support number that we could give out if we weren’t able to resolve the issue. Having the Infinite Conferencing support helped us with a very smooth delivery of the program.”
The typical SLS program runs two hours, and as many as 280 participants have tuned into the company’s webcasts. Of the more than 1,700 participants, 16 percent of the reach was via webcasts.
Rodke says that using Infinite Conferencing’s operator-assisted services has made the process simple. “Our relationship with Infinite Conferencing feels very natural--as if they are truly our partners in carrying out our contract deliverables. If we have a question, we receive an immediate response. You don’t get that kind of quality with just any vendor.”
