#  FlowFuse Webinars

FlowFuse organizes monthly webinars on topics about Node-RED, FlowFuse and the general IoT industry. The topics are typically educational and technical in content. The goal is to become the source of great content for learning about these topics.

The FlowFuse webinar is typically scheduled during the last week of the month. The webinar typically starts at 17:00CET or 11amET, to allow for European and Pacific coast of North America attendees. All webinars are recorded and the recording is made available on the FlowFuse Youtube channel.

The following are the steps to produce a montly webinar.

#  Webinar preparation

  1. Identify the webinar topic and speaker as close as possible to the previous webinar.
  2. Create a draft webinar title and abstract that is reviewed and approved by the speaker.
  3. Confirm the date with the speaker and send a calendar invite to block calendars
  4. Create a webinar page for the website
  5. Create a Zoom webinar page
    • Login to zoom and select the Webinars tab. There is a webinar template that will help getting going.
    • Use the same description and topic that was used for the web page.
    • Turn on Q&A, Enable Practice Session and Automatically record webinar to the cloud, require registration
    • Under Invitations, invite the speaker as a Panelist.
      • Panelist receive a unique url to join the webinar that grants them access before the webinar starts. It is important the speaker knows to use this url.
    • Under Email Setting ensure the following: Confirmation email sent to panelist, Reminder sent 1 hour and 1 day before. Turn off email for follow-up since we do that inside Hubspot.
    • Under Branding, for the banner add the graphic created for the web site.
    • Under Survey, you can decide if you want to do a survey at the end of the webinar. We ask if someone wants to be contacted by FlowFuse to discuss our services. These become MQLs in Hubspot.
  6. Setup HubSpot to accept webinar registrations.
    • Create a new static list called ‘Webinar Registrations [<month> Edition]
    • Create a new form - clone an existing webinar registration form and rename it
    • Edit Workflow called ‘Webinar Registration Integration with Zoom’. Three changes are required:
    • Edit enrollment criteria to the new registration form submission.
    • Edit ‘Add Contact to Zoom Webinar’ to update the new Webinar ID. Replace the current number with the number from the webinar you just created for this month. You find the Webinar ID on the main page of the Zoom webinar. NOTE: you need to hyphens to replace the spaces in the ID number.
    • Edit ‘Add to static list’ to change the list to the new list for this month’s webinar.
    • Remember to Save the changes.
  7. Test the web page for the webinar to see if a new registrant gets added to the Hubspot list.
  8. Page is now ready to be published.

#  Webinar Promotion

  • Week 1: Added to the newsletter (note to also promote on-demand version of the previous month's webinar in the newsletter)
  • Week 2: Social media promotion on all channels:
    • LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Node-RED Forum Event category, Redit Node-RED, Node-RED slack
    • Encourage FlowFuse employees to promote their network
    • Dedicated email to all in the community outreach list
  • Week 3 (1 week before webinar): Email to Hubspot list (Send to those you didn't open previous week's email and new leads in DB. Exclude registered leads)
    • Typically clone a previous email as the starting point.
  • Week 4: Another social media promotion and email.
    • Typically this is sent 1 day before the webinar as a reminder that its not too late to join.

#  Post Webinar

  • Upload webinar recording to FlowFuse Youtube channel
    • Trim out the dead air waiting to start the webinar
  • Publish webinar recording
  • Social media post with link to webinar recording
  • In Hubspot send follow-up email to the registration list created in Hubspot that includes a link to the recording on YouTube.
  • For those who wanted to be contacted, change Life Cycle Stage property to MQL

This webinar prep issue can be cloned and updated to keep track of activities.

#  Creating a Webinar Page

Webinar pages follow a fixed structure, you can see plenty of examples here in our website repository. Importantly, they must define the following properties at the top of the .md file:

#  Properties

Property Description
title The title of the webinar, this will also be what shows as the "title" when shared on socials
subtitle More context on what the webinar will involve
video Once you have an available video recording of the session, you can include the videos' YouTube id here to include the recording in the webinar's page
image Absolute file path to the image to show for the Webinar's tile
date The date that the webinar will take place
time The time that the webinar will take place, in both GMT & ET
duration How long, in minutes with the webinar last for
hosts A list of the webinar hosts, the names need to be formatted inline with the file names found here. If they're not part of the FlowFuse team, then you can find a list of guests in here, feel free to add any guest you need and remember to add the headshot image in the images/team folder following the same name convention as the rest of the files.
hubspot.formId The formId from HubSpot to handle the event registration

#  Example

---
title: "DevOps for Node-RED: An Introduction to FlowFuse"
subtitle: Join FlowFuse's CTO Nick O'Leary for an introduction to FlowFuse and how it provides DevOps for Node-RED.
video: 47EvfmJji-k
image: /images/webinars/intro-to-node-red-5-minutes-to-your-first-program-webinar-feb-2023.jpg
date: YYYY-MM-DD
time: HH:MM GMT (HH:MM ET) 
duration: MM
hosts: ["rob-marcer", "joe-pavitt"]
hubspot:
    formId: <form-id>
---