Case Study: Webcasting Fosters Better Parents in Washington

To that end, DIS producers of streaming video avoid flashy opening montages, effects, dissolves, and other transitions. They frame subjects tighter with the camera and avoid visually "busy" backgrounds and unnecessary motion.

Klosterman believes that if you use a lot of graphics you often give the viewer too much information. "You might get away with that if you were doing a PowerPoint presentation, but it doesn’t work for a Webcast," she says. You have to keep the limitations of your medium in mind and adjust your presentation to play to its strengths and weakness. "It makes more sense to make the presentation fit the medium," says Klosterman.

Klosterman frowns on PowerPoint-style Web sites and calls them "talking newspapers," because they are mostly text with audio narration. "Listening to someone just talk for an hour can get boring," she notes. Klosterman recommends that Web sites use streaming video to create user experiences that are more like watching a TV news program, with short, bullet-point comments and pre-produced video clips/segments.

Recently, the DIS has begun using the Accordent Technologies PresenterPRO tool for Webcasting presentations, and that too has prompted DIS staffers to alter their production mindsets. PresenterPRO presents new challenges because it uses two separate windows for the content; usually one for the video and one for text bullet points, but you can also put JPEGs and other things in the second window. "We have this whole other window of real estate we never had before," says Klosterman.

Klosterman also has some tips for improving the effectiveness of the Webcast events themselves. There at the DIS, producers always try to make sure there is a live audience for the Webcast presenter who is being recorded, even if it’s only four people. This gives the presenter someone to get visual cues and feedback from, and it makes the presentation seem more natural to the remote Internet viewer.

Also, don’t let the speaker just drone on, warns Klosterman. "Throw in some Q&A early on" to break up the monotony, she says. She also suggests planting a few questions in the audience. Sometimes a reticent audience needs to be urged to ask questions. They just need someone to start it off, someone to break the ice. Take some of your FAQs and feed them to your audience "plants," Klosterman recommends. Likewise, plant some email questions to jump start your email interaction.

Good Work Breeds More Work
Renée Klosterman is satisfied with the success of the foster parent Webcasts, even though that success has increased her workload. It has motivated other state agencies to demand her services. Still, not everyone in Washington is yet onboard the streaming video bandwagon, and so she has been working to rectify that.

"Webcasting is still science fiction for some people," she says. "So we spend a lot of time just educating people at the state agencies. But once they’ve tried streaming video, they are thrilled with it."

Klosterman regards the foster parent training program as a sort of proof-of-concept project that has laid the groundwork for even more exciting and effective streaming video training projects in the future. "Webcasting is going to be a huge training mechanism," she predicts.

So far, streaming video has been a very effective communications tool for her service agency, says Klosterman. The Internet provides her with a conduit to "get out the information" that she’s been asked to disseminate, and to do it in new and unique ways. "We can get out information to the public that we simply just would not have been able to get out before," she says.

And she points out that streaming video is helping to extend the reach of the Foster Parents Training Institute’s efforts beyond the state limits. The FPTI and DIS frequently get requests for their streamed video content from other states and other countries. And so Klosterman is not just "getting information out" to the state of Washington—she’s getting information out to the world.