How to Get from Online Meetings to an Education Platform

How to connect with thousands of members in large organizations? What is the best way to build a community around the idea and share knowledge with students scattered around the continent? Online meetings and webinars opened a new chapter for communication at ELSA Association. Let’s pull back the curtain and see how you can implement a similar strategy in your environment.

Video conferencing in general, and online meetings and webinars in particular, have become a natural part of a digital landscape.

Businesses and educational institutions of all sizes make the most of these forms of get-togethers to achieve their strategic goals. They reach their leads, customers, students, or employees in a faster, easier, and cheaper way than ever before.

Associations and other non-profit organizations have also discovered the power of online meetings and webinars. They deliver one message to thousands of members from different cities and countries, without overspending time and money on traveling.

How does it work for ELSA Association? We went to Brussels to meet its International Board and find out

ELSA stands for The European Law’s Student Association. It’s a vast, international, non-profit, and non-political organization that brings together law students and young lawyers from all over Europe.

• Connecting with thousands of law students and recent graduates to promote legal education and deliver the highest-quality knowledge from one spot.
• Enabling members to share their ELSA’s presentations and work together on their flag projects.
• Creating online courses with the help of webinars.

Building a comprehensive education platform packed with legal online courses.

Here at ClickMeeting, we know online project collaboration inside out. Not only because of the features we produced and have access to but, most importantly, because the fact that some of our team players work remotely, doesn’t stop us from pushing our projects forward.

Before we took off to Belgium to meet ELSA’s board members in person, we had a pretty much general idea of how this international association uses online meetings for their needs.

It all became much clearer when we sat together in their office located in a picturesque tenement house in Brussels.

Let’s give it to Sarah Ikast Kristoffersen, ELSA’s Deputy Vice President in charge of Academic Activities:

In real life, it boils down to the fact that ELSA’s members easily and frequently meet online in a virtual conference room to pass on the intel, exchange information to keep everyone up-to-date.

Which brings us to the significant question:

The big idea standing behind online meetings is to take the traditional business and team meetings, held in institutional premises, and migrate them to the digital world. Or at least, level them up and let remote team members join the meeting with something more useful than just a phone call.

Online meetings are the heart and soul of every successful project collaboration, and they are the only way to carry on with a project even if some (if not all) team players are on the move or live far away from the organization’s headquarters.

If you are serious about putting online meetings into action, you will gather up to 25 attendees in one video conferencing room.

To make it work, you will need tools like:

• Subaccounts and multiuser accounts,
• Enabling attendees to become presenters – to see and hear each other,
• Presentation to showcase what you work on,
• Whiteboard to draw or highlight important aspects of a project,
• Screen sharing to let you take your teammates by the hand through a document or an application on your desktop.

How does it work for ELSA? As Sarah Ikast Kristoffersen told us:

As we spent some more time with ELSA’s decision-makers, it turned out that online meetings were just a warm-up. This non-profit organization has made friends with webinars to share knowledge in a form of workshops, training sessions, or online courses.

As Sarah recalls:

But that only stimulated their appetites for more. İrem Özener, ELSA’s Vice President in charge of Marketing, explains:

Nana Gegia, the Secretary-General of ELSA International, backs it up:

It was a heartwarming experience for us when ELSA board members confirmed that they use webinars in a model way, especially being inspired by our Knowledge Base.

So, what’s the difference between online meetings and webinars?

The main one comes down to the audience size. Online meetings are designed to discuss and collaborate on projects in small groups. With webinars, on the other hand, you can scale up your online events and gather up dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of attendees in your webinar room.

Apart from the features described a couple of paragraphs above, you can make the most of webinars by engaging your audience by playing video materials, interacting with your attendees with polls and surveys, and chat.

But that’s not all!

Whereas collaborating on a project during online meetings has to happen in real-time, it doesn’t have to be a case for webinars.

You can, of course, run a live webinar but there is a huge potential somewhere else. Open the entrance door to the webinar automation and discover how can you can scale up your results and save time in the process. 

ELSA is already very active in the webinar field, but their ambitions don’t end on team collaboration and single webinar events.

Diomidis Afentoulis, the President of ELSA, reveals their biggest plan:

Will it be possible with ClickMeeting? Absolutely! There’s a set of tools that every online teacher and trainer will fall for:

• Automated webinars – events that take place at a particular time, but don’t require your presence. Record your webinar, compose your webinar timeline, and schedule it to go on autopilot!
• On-Demand Webinars – events that give your attendees an invaluable opportunity to watch it anytime they want to. Record your webinar content once and perfectly, release it to the digital stratosphere and let it work away on its own.
• Auto-stream your events on Facebook or YouTube.
• Automatic and fully customizable Thank-you emails sent to your attendees with all the educational materials and a webinar recording.
• Automatic Follow-up emails sent to those students who registered but didn’t show up at your event.
• Certificates of attendance – a cherry on top when it comes to enrolling an online course.

So, our friends from ELSA, if you’re reading this now, you can start building your ELSA Academy platform with all the confidence!

To wrap it up – is ClickMeeting a good solution for ELSA?

Let’s give it to the board members!

What Diomidis Afentoulis appreciates most is the Custom branding feature:

İrem Özener highlights some other aspects from the marketing perspective:

Running online meetings and webinars strikes as a natural choice for fulfilling ELSA’s core value which is knowledge sharing, connecting the entire huge network, and building a community around the idea.

Turn the green light to achieve similar results and sign up for a 30-day free trial today!