Summary: Quick tips, resources and links for choosing a best possible time for a webinar or teleseminar with participants from all over the world.
Scheduling a webinar or teleseminar
Arranging a webinar or teleseminar is easy, since you don't need expensive tools for it anymore. However, finding a suitable time when there are participants from all over the world is not that simple.
On this post I show you quick and easy way to both finding the best time for the webinar and informing the time of the webinar to the participants with cool link that shows different time zones.
In this post:
- examples of choosing a time for a global webinar or teleseminar.
- a quick tool to find the most suitable time for your webinar or meeting.
- a link builder you can use to generate a link to be sent to the participants so they can check their local time for the webinar.
How to schedule a global webinar
Use a World Clock Meeting Planner for finding suitable times. You can use the tool for any meeting, but it is meant for easily comparing different timezones.
- Meeting planner for up to 4 cities
- Example cities: Los Angeles (137) - New York (179) - London (136) - Sydney (240)
- For an audience in US-UK-Australia, the most suitable times for a webinar is 1500-1600 EST (not a night time for anyone)
- Meeting planner for 6 cities (advanced)
- Example cities: Bangalore (438) - London (136) - Los Angeles (137) - Manila (145) - New York (179) - Sydney (240)
- When you add India and Philippines to the US-UK-Australia mix, there is no suitable time for everyone (it will be middle of the night for someone)
Always record your webinar, as everyone who want, can't make it to your webinar, no matter how you schedule it.
Informing the time
Even the best webinar service providers fail at delivering localized time for the participants. You can do better, and send them a link like this, modifying the values for date, time and your time zone.
The link will look like this: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=7&month=7&year=2010&hour=15&min=0&sec=0&p1=179
- You can modify the values as needed.
- Go to the site to do that, or modify them by hand, or
- if you're real ninja, make a script that generates a link based on an event you have set.
The variables are:
- day = day, no preceding 0, e.g. 7 = 7, not 07
- month = month, no preceding 0, e.g. 7 = 7, not 07
- year = year, 4 digits, e.g. 2010
- hours = hour, 24H format, e.g. not 5PM, but 17
- min = minutes, e.g. 0
- sec = seconds, e.g. 0
- p1 = timezone (see below for common ones)
Click here to check what the page looks like: 7th of July 2010, 3PM EST.
Find the time zone codes and cities
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/
- PST – Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles (UTC -0800) = 137
- MST - US Mountain Time, Denver (UTC -0700 = 75
- CST - US Central Time, Chicago (UTC -0600) = 64
- EST – Eastern Standard Time, New York (UTC -0500) = 179
- GMT – Greenwich Mean Time, London (UTC +0000) = 136
- CET – Central European Time, Madrid (UTC +0100) = 195
- EET - Eastern European Time, Athens (UTC +0200) = 26
- EDT – Eastern Daylight Time, Sydney (UTC +1100) = 240
The system automatically shows Daylight Saving Time (DST) for each city. For example, Helsinki in Finland is always 101, but the time is different whether DST is active or not (UTC does not adjust to DST):
- Summer Time / DST: EEST - Eestern European Summer Time, Helsinki (UTC+0300) = 101
- EST - Eestern European Summer Time, Helsinki (UTC+0200) = 101
Interestingly, the service has a huge selection of cities in their database, not just big, major cities in each time zone. Even the tiny Tampere, Finland (1393). This means that you will find pretty much any city that you need from there (and at least you'll find the nearest "bigger city").
Summary
- Use the time World Clock Meeting Planner to plan a schedule global webinars.
- Find the best possible time by choosing 4 timezones & cities you expect to get webinar participants from.
- Choose the time based on the audience's timezones, not your own (unless they are the same)
- Always record the webinar for later use
Comments? Feedback?
- What tools you use for webinars?
- What's your method for finding the best possible time for a webinar?
