DNA Seminar Synergy – A Volunteer Success Story
by Tony Hanson
The spread of the Covid-19 virus in Texas made the cancellation of our April 18th Spring Seminar inevitable. It also made us think long and hard about if and how we should proceed with the Summer Seminar scheduled for July 25th.
The event was already going to be a technological challenge: we planned to have one live track (featuring Blaine Bettinger) but the other two tracks were going to feature remote presentations from a variety of presenters. The decision to proceed with the event as a three-track, entirely online event was a little daunting, but we decided to face the challenge.
While we were unsure how our usual attendees would feel about a purely online event, we recognized that the online format would potentially allow us to reach a much larger audience. As a result, we put a lot of additional effort into marketing.
Our marketing team was led by Sharon Bowles and included Kathleen Murray, Ken Johnston, Michelle Dwyer Cohen, Jim Thornhill and Tony Hanson. Ken, as usual, created stunning graphic images for us to use and laid out the brochure that was distributed through the mail. The group also mapped out a social media plan that included newsletter articles, direct email, Twitter and Facebook posts. Sharon asked for (and received) a small budget that was used to “boost” several of the Facebook posts which helped push them out to a wider audience.
Running three simultaneous sessions required learning a lot about the Video Conference platform we had chosen (Zoom Webinar) and we quickly realized that we were going to need a sizeable group of well-trained volunteers.
Suzan Younger, Todd DeDecker and I agreed to serve as the primary hosts for each of the sessions. The Texas State Genealogical Society (TxSGS) had gained a lot of experience running virtual meetings for Texas Societies, and wanted some additional experience with a large event. Susan Ball (President), Emily Richardson (Secretary) and Sandra Crowley (Director of Development and a past President of the DGS) all from TxSGS, volunteered to serve as troubleshooters on the day.
DGS members Deane Barron, Brenda Cannon, Mark Harrison, Bernard Meisner, Tresa Tatyrek and Jay Tompkins agreed to manage Question & Answers and to serve as back-up troubleshooters for each session. Jim Thornhill was tasked with managing Trouble Assistance: handling the phone-in bridge and online trouble submission form provided to assist attendees who ran into access issues.
The volunteer group began meeting multiple times each week beginning in June. We refined our scheduling process, became intimately familiar with Zoom, created detailed documentation for each role in each session, prepared contingency plans for potential problems and conducted numerous test calls. Michelle Dwyer Cohen, Susan Rainwater and Barbara Ware joined us on later calls to provide feedback from the point of view of the attendee.
Practice sessions scheduled the week of the event provided our attendees with an opportunity to go through all the steps necessary to join a session to ensure that their computer or tablet had the required software. Most of our registered attendees participated in these test sessions, which appeared to help minimize problems on the day of the event. We also held individual equipment check sessions with each speaker.
Our marketing team did an outstanding job. Attendees included 125 participants who lived within 100 miles of Dallas, which was about the number we probably would have expected for an in-person event. However, we also attracted 25 attendees from more distant parts of Texas, another 50 people from other states and even two participants from Canada!
The performance of those running the three sessions on the day of the event was equally impressive. Each session ran smoothly, and none of our contingency plans were implemented. The feedback from the post-event was extremely gratifying:
- 95% – Overall “Very Satisfied” or “Satisfied”
- 96% – Rated the Registration process as “Good”
- 98% – Rated “Gaining Access to the virtual seminar as “Good”
- 95% – likely to attend a future seminar
“Synergy” describes interaction that produces a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate parts, which is the perfect description of the contributions made by everybody who was involved in planning and running this seminar. Thanks to all of our volunteers!
