Live Streaming Chapter Meetings

by Reuben Saltzman December 7, 2017

My chapter, ASHI Heartland, offers live streaming of our chapter meetings. This is a great option for chapter members who live too far away to justify the drive to the chapter meetings. Chapter members can attend the meetings “live” from their phone, tablet or computer from anywhere. We also record our chapter meetings at the same time, which is a fantastic benefit to the chapter members who can’t attend the meetings online or in person due to scheduling conflicts.

We began offering live streaming of our chapter meetings almost by accident. What really drove us to begin streaming was a demand from our chapter members to record the meetings. We’ve had a lot of fantastic local speakers come to teach at our chapter meetings and our most dedicated chapter members are very disappointed when they have to miss these meetings. They started asking me to record the chapter meetings, so I looked into software that would record a two-hour meeting without creating an unwieldy 20 GB file. I found a type of software to do this called Zoom (https://zoom.us). It does a great job of recording our meetings and it does it almost as an afterthought.

MEET ZOOM
Zoom is online meeting software that also allows for online conference rooms. For hosting a chapter meeting online, their “Pro” package (current cost, $14.99 per month) is perfect. It allows for up to 100 participants, gives unlimited meeting duration, and provides the option to record the meeting on your computer or to the cloud. This price plan includes up to 1 GB of cloud recording space. A two-hour meeting gets recorded in MP4 format and only uses about 50 to 100 MB of storage. And no, that’s not a typo.

WHAT PARTICIPANTS SEE
Online participants get to see the PowerPoint presentation and hear the audio. This is the same way that most presentations from InspectionWorld® are recorded and made available on the ASHI website. To see a quick sample of what the recording looks like, visit youtu.be/oWQD1W3uw7s or go to YouTube and search “ASHI Heartland.” I uploaded a five-minute clip of a presentation that I did for our chapter back in July. This is the same thing that online participants see on their screen.

HOW TO HOST AN ONLINE MEETING
My chapter has been hosting online meetings for more than a year now and in that time, I think I’ve made just about every conceivable mistake that one could make. Here’s some advice to help you successfully host an online chapter meeting. 

Software: As I mentioned above, I use Zoom for my chapter, but there are dozens of competing types of software that will probably work fine. Pick one and test it out before a meeting to see if it will fit your needs.

Invites: Schedule the online meeting using the meeting software and send out an online meeting link to the chapter membership. I send out chapter meeting invites to a few hundred home inspectors in my area, but I only send the online meeting link to the paid chapter members. They receive this in a separate email the day of the chapter meeting. 

Internet: To live stream a meeting, you’ll need a reliable internet connection. Our chapter’s meeting location has a very slow internet connection, so I tether my laptop to my mobile phone and use that. I have T-Mobile and it has worked flawlessly.

Audio: This has been one of the biggest challenges. I started out using a lavalier mic that would wirelessly transmit the audio to a receiver that was plugged into the audio port on my computer. That system was nothing but problems. The transmitter wouldn’t sync with the receiver, the batteries would be dead, the presenter would pull the cord out of the transmitter and so on. Also, the microphone wouldn’t pick up any of the audience questions. 

We eventually purchased an external USB microphone and that has worked quite well. Mike Rostescu at ASHI recommended the Yeti Blue microphone, which currently retails for about $130 on Amazon. This microphone picks up the presenter’s voice from several feet away and picks up voices from the rest of the room quite well. It also comes with a 12-foot USB cable, which is long enough to put the mic wherever it needs to be placed.

At first, I used the stand that came with the microphone, but I quickly realized that the microphone is way too sensitive. Every time anything touched the table that the stand was sitting on, it was extremely loud. To eliminate that, we purchased a $20 microphone stand that the microphone screws right into. This works like a charm. 

Webcam: Ideally, every presenter will have a PowerPoint presentation, which should eliminate the need for a webcam. Nevertheless, we recently had a presenter at our chapter meeting who didn’t use PowerPoint slides. In order to not completely lose the online attendees, I used the built-in camera on my laptop to stream live video. That worked fine for everybody except for me; I had to keep my laptop turned at a funny angle to record the presenter. In the future, I’m going to bring an external webcam to meetings. 

The meeting: Begin the online meeting five minutes before the chapter meeting begins and ask the online attendees to sign in by typing their name in the “chat” section of the meeting software. Assign the task of manually recording these names to the meeting administrator. Near the end of the meeting, ask the attendees to sign in again, and again, assign someone the responsibility of manually recording the names. This verification is needed to get continuing education (CE) credit and yes, participating as a viewer of a live stream educational session does count for earning CE credit with ASHI.

Recording: With Zoom, our online meetings are set to begin recording by default. I do this to help make sure that I don’t forget to record the meeting. Once the meeting ends, the recording is automatically converted to an MP4 video file. We upload this file to my chapter’s YouTube channel the day after the meeting and I send out a video link to the paid chapter members. I make all of the videos “unlisted” on YouTube, which means that only people with the link can see them. I could take it one step further and make the videos “private,” but I see no need for that.

WHAT’S NEXT?
If you ask me for advice on hosting an online meeting a year from now, I’m sure I’ll have a completely different list of recommendations. This is new territory for my chapter, so our process is constantly evolving. If you start doing this for your own chapter and you figure out better ways of doing things, please share your ideas with me. No, better yet, get on the ASHI forum and share your advice there. I’ll be sure to thank you.

Reuben Saltzman, ACI, Structure Tech Home Inspections, Minneapolis, MN, is a second-generation home inspector, an ASHI Director (2017-2019) and President of the ASHI Heartland Chapter. Reuben presented educational sessions at InspectionWorld® in 2016 and 2017. Check out Reuben’s weekly blog posts at www.structuretech1.com/blog/.


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