2016 Attendance
Last year, we hosted a total of 4,875 attendees, which represents 39% growth over 2015’s record attendance of 3,502. With last year’s average of 487 attendees per event, NTH’s webinar program is now attended more than Engineering News Record’s national webinar program, which generates 190 attendees, on average, per event.
We pay close attention to what our webinar attendees say in their post-webinar surveys. We agonize over the survey scores and frequently try new, small experiments to see how we can make improvements. One small change this year led to a 200% increase in the number of attendees who completed a short satisfaction survey following the webinar. Rather than emailing attendees and asking them to complete a survey (a 20% response), our surveys now automatically appear when the attendee exits the webinar, resulting in a 60% participation rate. This response rate increase has led to more accurate scores and more suggestions related to how we can improve in the future. Thank you!
2016 Program Quality
When we began our program in 2011, we featured NTH engineers exclusively as webinar speakers. They talked about their services, their expertise, and their industry insights. Eventually, however, we discovered a content-creation program cannot be sustained for very long using this approach. In 2016, we broke from our traditions and began featuring many more outside speakers. As a result, eight of our 10 programs last year included speakers from outside NTH. Attendance and satisfaction surged. We now actively seek out the best speakers, both locally and nationally, to participate in our webinar program. In 2017 we’ll continue along this path, bringing our clients and prospective clients the most current and relevant topics we can muster. As always, we welcome your suggestions.
2017 Programming
With a new administration in the White House and over 7 ½ years since our last recession, we are thinking a lot about the economy and our industry’s near-term future. We are beginning our 2017 webinar season with David J. Staley, an associate professor at The Ohio State University talking about how to conduct strategic planning within environments that are characterized by uncertainty. David is well versed on the subject of “futuring” and how we can incorporate multiple possible scenarios and their outcomes into our business planning process. Next, in March, we’ll host the legendary David Burstein, P.E. from PSMJ Resources, Inc. who will talk about the current state of the AE industry and his outlook for 2017. We hope you can join us.
Our webinars are always free, they are always good for one professional development hour, and they are always available for viewing anytime on our website here. We hope to see you in 2017!