Visit Parliament House in your pyjamas: why webinars remain an effective way to engage policymakers

With much of the country grappling with Delta variant-driven outbreaks, those of us who had hoped to host or attend events in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne were forced to cancel our plans. Australian Parliament House was closed to the general public and won’t be open again for a sitting week until October 2021. With the two main political parties already moving into election planning, this is problematic for healthcare companies hoping to make the case for reimbursement for their therapies. A very 2020 solution that can come to the rescue: webinars.

Things are changing every day, meaning it is difficult to be sure that any event will go ahead until the final stages of the vaccine roll-out later this year or early next. In this uncertain environment, webinars are the safest option.

In what contexts could healthcare companies organise webinars instead of face-to-face events? 

• Raising awareness of a disease area in the general public or amongst politicians. Webinars are an opportunity to educate individuals on the importance of preventing disease, what symptoms to look out for, and how they can care for themselves. You can organise a webinar to inform parliamentarians of important healthcare issues that they can help with. You have no time to lose at this stage of the election cycle.
• Introduce leads and customers to a product, a user case, or to a service update. Webinars are effective in the Engage and Delight stages of the buyer’s journey. Webinars can convince a potential customer that your service offering is right for them, or can be an opportunity to demonstrate some exciting product features to your existing customers.
• Internal communications. Was a big internal meeting cancelled because of COVID-19? Do you need to get the executives together to present to the country managers? Webinars might be the right format for this type of event. When everyone is not required to give their input, the panelist-and-attendee format works nicely.

Some of you may shudder at the thought of setting up and hosting a webinar, especially for the healthcare industry where some of the content could be confidential.

We have a few tips for those setting up webinars for the health industry, which can be downloaded here. Our tips are based on the Zoom Webinar function, as this is the platform that we use. WHY? Zoom has excellent functionality for webinars including interactive features and enhanced security.