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ANA | Case Study | ON24

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How ON24 webinars empower the American Nurses Association to do more

Capabilities

Use Cases

About

The American Nurses Association (ANA) is the premier organization representing the interests of the nation’s 4 million registered nurses. ANA is at the forefront of improving the quality of health care for all. Founded in 1896, and with members in all 50 states and U.S. territories, ANA is the strongest voice for the profession.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) chose Webcast Elite for its annual National Nurses Week webinar, the organization’s most well-attended event. The webinar has proven to be ANA’s number one new member recruitment source. This year’s webinar drew more than 11,000 registrations — an increase of more than 40% over the previous — and featured a live video broadcast to more than 6,000 viewers in 4,500 locations

Introduction

Using webinars as a membership value add

The American Nurses Association is the only full-service professional organization representing the interests of the nation’s 3.1 million registered nurses.

The organization holds monthly webinars that are free to members, while non-members can pay a fee to attend. These webinars deliver important information of interest to nurses and additionally serve as a platform to earn continuing education contact hour credits.

By far, the ANA’s largest and most well-attended webinar is its annual National Nurses Week live broadcast held each May to commemorate the birthday of Florence Nightingale. When the new marketing director came to ANA, one of her first priorities was to improve the overall quality of this high-visibility event, which is used to recognize and celebrate nurses all across the U.S.

Problem

The search for a reliable platform that scales to the thousands

ANA’s other webinar platform had a cap of 2,000 registrants and was prone to technical issues. In one webinar with 900 participants, the system crashed, ANA could not reestablish a connection, and the event had to be cancelled.

ANA finally decided it was time to increase marketing to support the National Nurses Week webinar. Expecting a much larger audience, ANA felt they needed a platform that could:

  • Reliably scale to the thousands of participants, with no technical issues or service disruptions
  • Deliver a top-quality presentation, reflecting the organization’s professionalism and membership value
  • Provide a superior, interactive experience for all attendees

ANA also recognized an opportunity to use the webinar as a membership recruitment driver and focused on reaching out to a large number of non-member participants, which made it even more important to have an event that was a positive reflection on the organization.

Solution

ON24: the answer for high-volume, high-quality webinars

The marketing director had experience with the ON24® Platform from her last job and trusted it to provide the user experience she needed for this important and highly visible broadcast.

Compared to its prior webcasting platforms, ANA was impressed with:

  • The all-in-one, simplified platform: ANA worked with ON24 to set up its registration pages, create and send confirmation emails and build and deliver webinar presentations, all from a single platform — replacing the need to log into different systems.
  • The ability to stream live, broadcast-quality video: For the first time, the National Nurses Week webinar featured a live video broadcast. An onsite video production team streamed the presentations from a panel of industry key opinion leaders who fielded questions from the virtual audience throughout the event.
  • The superior support offered by the Premium Event Management Package: With the purchase of this service package, ON24 event experts assisted ANA in its event setup (creating the registration, lobby and console pages), trained its speakers, monitored the live event and helped archive the event for on-demand viewing.
  • The optional Audience Phone Bridge: ANA chose to offer a dial-in option as a backup alternative. A meager 1.2 percent of the National Nurses Week webinar attendees used the phone bridge, mostly audience members who were more comfortable dialing into a phone bridge than streaming from their computers.

Results

Worry-free execution that exceeded expectations

Since implementing Webcast Elite, ANA’s annual National Nurses Week webinar is:

  • ANA’s most successful tool for new-member recruitment
  • Drawing record numbers of registrants, attendees and on-demand viewers, due to the platform’s scalability and professional appeal
  • 6,000 attendees in 4,500 locations spent an average of 55.4 minutes in the 60-minute webinarReducing webinar creation time by up to 65 percent over prior platforms
  • Increasing ANA’s social media outreach, with the webinar fueling more than 650 tweets and over 4,000 Facebook likes.

Webcast Elite’s ease of use is also giving ANA the ability to communicate quickly:

  • ANA often needs to communicate with nurses on the national level on health care issues and crises.
  • ANA created and broadcast two crisis-related webinars viewed by thousands of nurses in less than two weeks, timing that was just not feasible on prior platforms.

“ON24 allows us to give our webinars a ‘wow’ factor. This helps us elevate our reputation and leave a strong impression with would-be members, which may be why our webinars are our number one recruiting source.”

Elise Swinehart, Marketing Director, Membership & Marketing

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