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Webinar Programme Planning Template

A run-of-show that carries a start minute on every segment, so the attendee report can tell you what was on screen when the room emptied.

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Run-of-Show

Platform roadmap and what ships next quarter

45 minutes  ·  minute zero anchored to the actual start  ·  titled segment marked once

StartSegmentPresentLeft
0Housekeeping and how to use the Q&A panel26842
4Speaker introductions22631
9Where the business is, by the numbers19548
14How we decide what goes on the roadmap14738
22What shipped last quarter10938
27What ships next quarter7130
36Live Q&A4117
45Session ends24

The budget before the promise

27 of 45 minutes, 60% of the slot, runs before the titled segment. 812 people registered for that segment. 71 were in the room when it began: 26.5% of the attendees and 8.7% of the registrations.

Fill in the planned start before the session and the actual start from the recording. A four-minute overrun in segment two moves every segment below it, and a drop-off attributed to the wrong segment is worse than none.

Kesgrave's biggest webinar of the year took 812 registrations on the promise of what ships next quarter. 268 turned up, a 33.0% show rate nobody queried, and the report called it the best session of the year. The agenda put that segment at minute 27, behind housekeeping, two speaker introductions, a business update and a framing slide. When it began, 71 people were in the room. It produced 2 opportunities and $84,000, and the debrief spent twenty minutes on the registration figure without once mentioning minute 27.

Nothing exotic is needed to see that. An attendance report carries join times, leave times and in-meeting duration per person, and a run-of-show carries a start minute per segment. Same clock, so they join, and almost nobody joins them. YouTube's own guidance makes the structural version of the point for video: a dip means viewers abandoned at that specific part, and content that holds attention late should be moved earlier.

Across the nine sessions the median attendee left before the titled segment began in four of them. Those four took 65.7% of the year's registrations and produced 21.0% of its pipeline. Pipeline per registration was $201 where the promise was missed and $1,450 where it landed. No registration ranking finds that, because registrations against attended minutes correlate at +0.03. The pack sits beside the webinar follow-up and lead scoring tool, the sponsorship evaluation and event content repurposing tools, the monthly marketing report pack, the event and conference pack, and the community programme pack.

The sheets that read a leave time as an agenda item

Drop-off mapped against two run-of-shows, the programme ranked on minutes, and five promotion channels scored on watched time.

Drop-off Against Run-of-Show

Two sessions from the same programme. Same nine-webinar year, same audience, opposite ordering.

StartSegmentPresentLeftLeft, % of attendees
Platform roadmap and what ships next quarter  ·  812 registered  ·  268 attended  ·  median out at minute 14
0Housekeeping and how to use the Q&A panel2684215.7%
4Speaker introductions2263111.6%
9Where the business is, by the numbers1954817.9%
14How we decide what goes on the roadmap1473814.2%
22What shipped last quarter1093814.2%
27What ships next quarter713011.2%
36Live Q&A41176.3%
Migrating off spreadsheets without a freeze  ·  310 registered  ·  181 attended  ·  median out at minute 37
0Welcome, and the one thing this session answers181105.5%
3Why a freeze is the usual answer, and what it costs171116.1%
8The three migration shapes, and how to pick160105.5%
14What has to be true before you start15095.0%
21Running both systems in parallel, step by step1412011.0%
33Cutover weekend, hour by hour1213821.0%
39Live Q&A83126.6%

The roadmap session put its promise at minute 27 and 8.7% of its registrants saw it. The migration session put its promise at minute 21 and 45.5% of its registrants saw it, a factor of 5.2 on the same measure.

The migration session loses more people at minute 33 than anywhere else, and that is fine. The promise had already landed eleven minutes earlier. Where a segment sheds people matters more than how many.

Attendees present at minute zero must equal the attendee count, and the per-segment losses plus those present at close must equal it again. If either fails, the clock alignment is wrong and nothing here is reportable.

Topic Ranking

Nine sessions, ranked on attended minutes, with the registration rank left in place beside it.

SessionRegsRank, regsAtt. minutesRank, minutesMoveOppsPipeline
Migrating off spreadsheets without a freeze31065,9731+514$612,000
How Trelough cut cycle time by a third37255,7422+39$402,000
Compliance changes taking effect in July54945,6643+16$244,000
Live build: approvals in 20 minutes28875,3944+311$486,000
Platform roadmap and what ships next quarter81214,8565-42$84,000
Reconciling two systems after an acquisition24484,3806+28$358,000
Buyer’s guide to procurement software60434,3057-44$168,000
The state of the market, annual survey73124,0978-61$46,000
Ask us anything, open office hours19693,267905$187,000
9 sessions4,10643,67860$2,587,000

Registration rank and minutes rank agree almost not at all. Rank correlation between them is +0.03. Against median dwell it is -0.75 and against pipeline -0.62: in this programme the bigger the room, the less it produced.

The two figures worth optimising are the ones nobody targets. Attended minutes against pipeline runs at +0.73, median dwell against pipeline at +0.97.

A session with no attendee file is marked pending and left out of the totals rather than estimated.

Promotion Channel Performance

One session, five channels, scored on the minutes its registrants watched rather than the registrations it booked.

ChannelRegs% of regsAtt.RateMedianAtt. minutesMin. per reg
Paid social34142.0%8524.9%141,1503.4
Syndication partner26833.0%6624.6%117202.7
House list, all contacts12215.0%5746.7%191,2009.8
House list, customers only435.3%3376.7%331,08025.1
Speaker’s own audience384.7%2771.1%2870618.6
All channels812100.0%26833.0%144,8566.0

The two bought channels took 609 registrations and the two owned channels took 81. They delivered 1,870 and 1,786 attended minutes: 7.5 times the registrations for 1.05 times the watched minutes.

Per registration, owned reach was worth 7.2 times bought reach. A registration report ranks the bought pair first by a distance. An attended-minutes column shows them drawing with two channels that cost nothing.

Score bought against bought and owned against owned. Minutes per registration will always flatter a customer list, and a syndication partner reaching strangers has a job beyond one session.

What's in the pack

01

Run-of-Show

A start minute on every segment, planned and actual, with the titled segment marked once and the minutes before it totalled.

02

Webinar Brief

Promise first, titled segment second, title last. Carries the constraint that the promise lands inside the first third of the session.

03

Retention Method

Fixes what a minute means before any get counted: the attendance minimum, the clock anchor, segment resolution, and what the method will not claim.

04

Promotion Plan

Channels scored on minutes per registration, not registrations. Pairs with the channel mix and CAC review upstream.

05

Follow-up Sequences by Behaviour

Five dwell bands with the copy for each, because the export has no chat or poll data and dwell is the signal it reliably has.

06

Drop-off Against Run-of-Show

One row per segment: the minute it began, who was still present, and who left during it. The sheet the pack exists for.

07

Registration and Attendance Analysis

One row per person, aggregated across every join-and-leave pair first, with dial-in attendees who arrive without an email address kept rather than dropped.

08

Topic Ranking

The programme ranked on attended minutes with the registration rank beside it, plus the five rank correlations that make the case.

09

Pipeline Attribution

Credits a session only where a record ties to a named attendee, and reports the untied count as a ceiling on what the programme may claim.

10

Programme Review

Four questions in the order that stops each one overclaiming, ending in three decisions with the figure each should move.

How to use it

  1. 1

    Open in River, or take it blank

    Open the pack in River and send the exports you already have, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and fill them in yourself.

  2. 2

    Send one attendee report and one agenda

    Pick the session with your best registration number, because that is where the gap is normally largest. The agenda matters as much as the attendee file.

  3. 3

    Check the row count before anything is sorted

    Most exports write one row per join-and-leave pair, so durations have to be summed per person first. Skip it and every ranking downstream is quietly wrong.

  4. 4

    Read the titled-segment figure first

    How many were present when the segment named in the title began, as a share of registrations. On the worked example that was 8.7% against a 33.0% attendance rate.

Frequently asked questions

Is this template free?

Yes, and the download is the whole thing. The zip holds all twelve files in Word and CSV, with no signup and no card. Edit with AI is the other branch: send an attendee report and an agenda and the agent does the join for you. More packs in the template library.

What format are the downloaded files?

Word (.docx) for the six documents and CSV (.csv) for the six sheets, in one zip. The sheets open in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and the documents open in Word or Pages. Add ?format=pdf to the download if you want to read them rather than fill them in.

How is this different from a webinar planning checklist?

A checklist orders tasks by weeks before the date and stops at the send. This orders the session itself by minute, then reads the attendee report against those minutes. The checklist question is whether the webinar happened. This one is whether anybody was still there for the part you promised.

What if my agenda has no timings on it?

Reconstruct them from the recording, which is usually a ten-minute job for a 45-minute session. Failing that, the actual start time plus a rough answer on when the main topic began is enough to show the mechanism. Approximate segment starts still beat a duration with nothing to compare it to.

Does the drop-off tell me why people left?

No, and the pack is explicit about it. It tells you what was on screen when they left, which is a different and more useful thing than a guess at motive. One session's segment drop-off is a hypothesis; it becomes a finding when the same segment type sheds people across three or more sessions.

Why not just rank webinars on registrations?

Because in the worked programme those two rankings correlate at +0.03. The biggest session ranked first on registrations and fifth on minutes watched, producing 2 opportunities. The sixth biggest ranked first on minutes and earned 7.3 times its pipeline. Registrations measure the title, not the session.

What does Edit with AI actually do?

It creates a free account, installs these twelve files as a private workspace, and opens by asking for one attendee report and the matching agenda. Then send whatever you have: a year of sessions, a partial export, an agenda with no times. It aligns the clock itself and shows the working.

Find out who was still there for the part you promised

Download the twelve files and map one session's leave times against its agenda, or install the pack and let River align the clock for you.

Edit with AI