Does planning and organising really float your boat? 

OR…do you live in unorganised chaos, but long to kick-ass at organising? 

Either way, you might be surprised about how Microsoft tools can help you!  

In this blog you will learn: 

• How to set up a webinar using Microsoft Teams  
• How to tweak your webinar settings carefully depending on what you want your attendees to experience 
• Microsoft Teams webinars won’t do everything for you – find out what else you’ll need to do to plan and organise your webinar. 

How to set up a webinar using Microsoft Teams   

You’ll need to make sure you’ve got the right licence and access to set up a Microsoft Teams Webinar. This might mean you have to talk to your IT department (sorry). For more details on that, go here: Meetings, webinars, and live events – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

Also be aware that some webinar features are only available with a Teams Premium licence. 

Once you’ve got those requirements out of the way, setting up a webinar is easy peasy. 

In your Microsoft Teams calendar, click on the drop down next to new meeting and choose the webinar option: 

You’ll then get some forms to fill in to create your webinar by providing basic info like what the webinar is about and when it will be: 

You’ll need to press save on the initial information to be able to edit the rest – but! Before you hit save, know that you can’t change this bit afterwards: 

So you’ll need to settle on whether your webinar is internal-only to your organisation, or public facing, meaning anyone at all can sign up to join. 

Once you’ve saved, you can use the options on the left hand side to flesh out the rest of your webinar. 

You can add presenter bio information for each presenter. 

You can also change how the webinar registration page looks: 

You can also see the list of automated emails that get sent to attendees and preview what they look like: 

When you think you’re ready, you can click on publish site, and your webinar registration page will be ready for people to use!  

You’ll get an easy to share link: 

And your registration page will look something like this: 

Attendees can register using the register button. 

See, I told you it was easy.

Make sure your webinar settings are right for your webinar 

Before you publish your webinar, you’ll need to make sure that your settings are right for your attendees. 

Start with the end in mind – what experience do you want your attendees to have? Think about from when they sign up to the webinar, to attending the webinar, and afterwards. 

Also – what do you want to get out of the webinar? Sales leads? Equipping people with knowledge?    

Asking yourself these questions will help with modifying some all-important settings of the webinar, which you can find here:

There are lots of settings that fall to default mode here, which may not give you the webinar experience you’re after – so it’s important to go through these in detail. 

For example – there are 4 settings that involve the meeting lobby; which directly affect how people join: 

If you want people who have registered to bypass the lobby and get straight into the meeting – you’ll have to toggle that to yes (you can see here it defaults to no). 

I think I’d be annoyed if I’d registered for the webinar and then had to wait to be admitted – it would seem to defeat the object of registering. 

You can also choose co-organisers which might be helpful if you have a team around the webinar and don’t have to fly solo: 

Setting rules around who can present is something you’ll probably want to test before the live webinar, to make sure that the people you’re expecting to be able to present, actually can present! 

Then there are a bunch of settings that define how your attendees will engage with the webinar (or not): 

Do you want them to be on video if they want to?

Do you want them to be able to speak if they want to? 

Or do you want to disable this option and leave questions until the end so that you don’t interrupt the flow of the session? 

Also you’ll see ‘record automatically’ is defaulted to yes – you may not want this on for good reason. 

Do you want attendees to be able to type messages into the chat? Or do you want to push them down the Q&A route so that you can moderate questions? 

All these things are worth thinking about – especially if you’re going to run lots of webinars. You’ll want people to have a good experience so that they come back again. 

You also have options around interpreters which might be important for your webinar – and you’ll probably want an attendance report for post-webinar follow ups:

Whenever you make changes to these settings, don’t forget to hit save at the bottom – I nearly always do! 

A Microsoft Teams webinar won’t do everything for you 

So now you’ve got the simple tools to get people registered for your webinar and deliver it – but you’ll still need to get a bit more organised than that. 

Tell people what to expect 

Start with the end in mind – what is the goal of the webinar? You’ll need to factor that into the description so that people know what it’s for. Be really clear about this too – there’s nothing worse than making time to attend a webinar that turns out to be nothing like the description. 

Share and share and share

Also – having a link to a webinar registration page is one thing, but you’ll need ways to share that with people so that they actually attend! Where are you going to promote it? This will need a whole plan of it’s own. 

Follow-up

Then, what will you do after the webinar? 

You can access post-event reporting – so what does success look like to you? The number of people who signed up? The number of people who came? How active the chat was during the session? How many questions people asked? 

Don’t forget to plan your success metrics so that you’ll know whether your webinar hit the mark or not. 

As you can see, there’s no dark art to webinars, it just takes a bit of planning. 

If you know someone who would benefit from this blog – please share!