The way to measure the ROI of a webcast is by applying the ROI rules of digital development generally. What is the development trying to accomplish for you, and did it achieve what you hoped?

• Is is about audience development? Who are you trying to reach?
• Is it about artistic development or experimentation? What did you learn and what did online audiences think?
• Is it about creating efficiencies? Does that training course really need to be delivered in several locations? Can work hours be saved?
• Is it about lowering travel costs, time spent travelling to events or carbon footprint?

Think about how people benefit
Consider what are longer-term, more intangible benefits:

• Do online participants get the opportunity of an experience with your organisation they would not otherwise have (for example, because of geography or cost barriers)?
• Do they get a more regular experience? Does this save you money in more intangible ways (you might not need to send them a brochure about your membership scheme, because they engage regularly with you online)?
• Do they come to a live event where you’re based because of the successful marketing job an online event has achieved?

Use analytics to set benchmarks to measure against
You can use the stats package of any good webcasting service provider to get the raw data results of how many watched, where they were from, and what website they watched from.
An online questionnaire can easily be sent out to webcast online participants if you capture their email address, or you could use a webcasting service that lets you take polls and gather votes, or glean feedback through the live online chat.

As participants can use online event sign-up systems to register for a webcast, it means that you have a set of email addresses that a post-webcast questionnaire can be sent out to. Envirodigital can provide online questionnaires to help you measure your audiences’ experience.

Think about the cost, time and carbon savings – efficiencies measured by Envirodigital’s widget

Envirodigital's widget to capture cost, time and carbon savings through webcasting

Webcasting also increases the efficiency of an event, saving on travel time, travel cost and carbon emissions. Envirodigital is currently trialling a widget that encourages webcast participants to type in a few details about where they’re watching from, and what their journey to the live event might have involved. The widget enables us to show individual participants and the event organisers what they’ve saved, whilst still increasing the scale, reach, impact and accessibility of the live event. Envirodigital’s widget told us that client AmbITion Scotland‘s Inverness-based event Webinar 7 had 20 online testers: 5011 miles were NOT travelled by them, saving the impact of 819kg of carbon emissions, as well as £500 of travel costs and 66 hours of travel time. (819kg carbon dioxide is equivalent to making 48683 cups of tea, running a drinks machine for 7.3 months or 27 PC monitors running in work time for a whole year!)

Webinar 5′s 20 online testers from across the UK saved 3707 miles of travel, 372kg of carbon dioxide, 38 hours of travel and over £500 travel costs. That’s the equivalent of 17366 cups of tea, 2.7 months worth of powering a drinks machine and running 10 PC monitors during working hours for a year.