Our 1st webinar

When we were preparing for our first live webinar in just 3 days, we were under no illusions that it was going to be a walk in the famous Addis Ababa Unity Park 🤔.

Having this fact in mind, we failed to test our network & platform of our choice in advance, and do some rehearsals with dummy attendees.

At 6 PM local time, we just sat in front of our computers thinking... "this is big & sweet for us... Oh!... how wrong we were 😃. Despite having participated in many live webinars ourselves, we’d never actually run our live webinar. But we know the format has become increasingly popular so it was our time to give it a try.

We wanted to gauge the level of interest in the live webinar too. Why not? Actually some issues were in my mind: Would people register? Yes, in their droves with over 80 sign-ups from 13 countries, including Ethiopia. This was our best success! Then the day of the webinar arrived, and we thought we were ready. Twenty minutes before the webinar was scheduled to begin, there was a blackout at my home + internet disruption too. Then I set up a second computer as a webinar waiting room and a mobile phone as a source of data network. Our host dialing in from South Africa could not get access. No matter what buttons I pressed, how many times I shut down and restarted, the local network and the free platform were just not cooperating. The same happened to some of our dialing attendees too (Sorry🤕!) Those in the room were patiently waiting for the webinar to begin. The clock struck 6: 15..... 6:20... “There’s no sound.” “I can’t hear anything.” “There’s no audio.” “Hello?” Then the worst had happened. The streaming started glitching for our attendees. The horror begun 🥶 After the initial shock wore off, we knew we had to find some learnings from this experience. Of course, we will! Yesterday's webinar reminds us that each time we try something new, it will get easier each time. If we don’t get something right the first time we need to keep trying. The beginning is always the hardest. The first step takes courage. Only when the first step is taken, do we realize that it’s not all that bad! We are now confident. We want to take another step, and see what lies beyond. Thank you IMLEA 🇮🇳