Short is sweet

I just completed a 4-part webinar series for the State of Iowa's Tourism Division.  

When they first asked me to do it, we talked a lot about what structure would work best for busy marketing professionals/business owners.

Most webinars are 45-90 minutes long but we decided to try something different.  A 30-minute webinar. 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes of questions.  

At first, I was a little worried.  Could I pack enough hearty content into such a short time frame?

Turns out -- the answer is yes.  The short timeframe forced me to really hone in on key points and drive them home quickly.  There wasn't room for any fluff or less than stellar content. I also added a homework element so that they could be working on the content all week, in between webinars.

Based on the feedback from each of the four sessions, the participants loved that they could devote 30-45 minutes (I will admit, all of the question portions went longer than 10 minutes) to professional development and then get right back to work. They also liked that the content was chunked rather than provided all at once.

The chunking and shorter timeframes allowed them to absorb each element before taking on the next one.

I think we can take both lessons -- short is sweet and the power of chunking information and look for other places (your website, blog posts, brochures, sales documents, etc) we can apply them.

Where else might you use these techniques?

~ Drew

Comments

[Charlie Ahern]

Short, chunky meetings!

No meeting should be scheduled for more than 30 minutes. After that you're probably wasting someone's time.

I like the "daily scrum" style meetings. Meet every day, same-time, same-place for 15 minutes. Only the players speak, the curious only observe. Each person states; what I did yesterday, what I plan to do today, and what or who is in my way.

[Drew McLellan]

Charlie,

I like it -- scrums for status update type meetings. How would you modify a typical meeting that was for brainstorming or some other sort of team work?

Drew