This is part of our year-long celebration of Global Wire Associates’ 10th Anniversary.
In 2007 Global Wire Associates started doing webinars to extend its brand of digital education to online communities. As some of you might remember, we used to tape our webinars in a classroom setting with a blackboard that would be posted later onto our now defunct YouTube channel. In those days we did four webinars a year mainly about using digital media tools for NGO advocacy.
Over the years as online video abilities increased in both distribution and quality, we have been able to deliver more educational programming that specifically caters to our clientele. Also, we have realized that we could reach more people and spend less money and resources on in-person seminars if we utilized online platforms more often and effectively.
“In the last three years alone, attendance for our online video programs has gone up exponentially, going from 40-50 attendees in early 2012 to almost 100 attendees per webinars now,” said Global Wire Associates online video director Brian Druary. “Many of the attendees come from all over the world, even in countries we don’t usually do in-person seminars. This is great because it shows our growth and demand for our services.”
The diversity of the subject matter has increased over the years as well. Some of our most popular webinars range from “Branding and Strategic Content Development” to “Interactive Multimedia” to “Video Journalism 101.” We also bring in experts sometimes to participate in online panel discussions, like the one we did called “Designing Women” with a group of women web designers, developers, engineers and other technologists. Another popular webinar that has become a regular staple in our video programming is “Extreme Website Makeover,” where our staff from Global Wire Design show and discuss a real website redesign they worked on and show before and after mockups. We also run ContentCamp, a week-long online series about making great content, and next month will host our first online mini-conference on e-commerce. Of course, we end the year with our annual online party, the holiday mashup!
“Our webinars are informative and, most importantly, a lot of fun,” Druary said. “We now have a regular group of attendees who come to our webinars and stay in contact with each other and learn from each other. That is the type of online community we have built here.”
In the last year, we have introduced a new feature into our portfolio. The Classroom is our video conferencing space here on this website for educational webinars and other live events. We are now able to host up to 30 webinars and events a year. Currently after any live events, videos are rebroadcast six times within the following 48 hours.
Last month we launched Classroom Premium for our Blue members. Subscribers have the option to watch any video recorded in the last four years on-demand at their convenience and download it onto their devices. Users are also able to watch replays of videos from the last four months streaming on a continuous loop on two channels. We currently have over 2,300 hours of video in our library to watch, including highlights from our 10th anniversary party in New York City last month.
Because we have such a vast international viewing audience, we are always looking for better ways to accommodate their learning needs. Our videos have closed captioning in English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian and Chinese, with the possible addition of Hindi in the near future. Next year we will be introducing live audio translations and MP3 recordings.
We hope you will join our online community!
To learn more about our online live events, go to our upcoming events page.
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