Webinar checklist: the half-hour before is what decides it

Webinars fail in boring ways. The audio is wrong, the slides are not shared, the host cannot see the questions, nobody knows who answers them, and the recording turns out not to have started. A webinar checklist exists because none of that is a content problem — it is a sequence problem, and the half-hour immediately before the session is where almost all of it is decided.

The week before

• Decide the one thing an attendee should be able to do afterwards. Everything else is filler.
• Confirm who presents, who moderates and who answers questions. These are three jobs and should rarely be one person.
• Send the joining link twice — on registration and on the day. Most no-shows are people who could not find the link.
• Prepare the first and last two minutes word for word; the middle can be improvised.
• Decide what happens if a demonstration fails, before you need it.

The webinar checklist for the half-hour before

1. Join early on the device you will actually present from, not a second one.
2. Test audio by recording ten seconds and playing it back — microphone selection is the single commonest failure.
3. Share the exact window you will use and confirm what the audience sees, including whether notifications are visible.
4. Turn off anything that can interrupt: notifications, calendar alerts, automatic updates.
5. Confirm the recording is running after the session starts, not before — that is the step everybody intends to check and nobody does.
6. Have the moderator post the first question themselves, so the question panel is not empty when people arrive.

Put the presenting device on a wired connection if one exists. Video conferencing degrades gracefully for attendees and badly for the person talking, and the presenter is the one participant whose connection cannot be compensated for.

During

The moderator reads questions aloud rather than expecting the presenter to watch a panel while talking — nobody can do both well. Answer the easy questions in writing as they arrive and save the interesting ones for the end, where they are worth more than the last planned slide. And if a live demonstration breaks, say so and move to the prepared screenshots rather than troubleshooting in front of two hundred people; the audience forgives the failure and not the ten minutes.

Afterwards

1. Send the recording and the answers to unanswered questions the same day, while interest is still live.
2. Measure two numbers: the share of registrants who attended, and the share of attendees who stayed to the end.
3. Read the questions as a list — they are the clearest statement of what your audience does not understand.
4. Decide whether the session earned a repeat before planning the next one.

Ettex Slides handles the presenting side with speaker notes and present mode, including the detail that a reload returns you to the presentation rather than to the editor — which matters most in exactly this format. The follow-up belongs in a written document rather than in the deck, because the people who matter most often watch the recording instead.