The other day I was moderating a webcast for a large technology company, and as usual we all dialed in a half hour early to make sure everyone’s phone was working, the presenters were comfortable pushing their slides, and generally just to ensure we were all set to go at our allotted start time.

As the clock was ticking to the top of the hour, one of the members of our team was MIA.  Unfortunately it was our featured presenter, who was giving a very detailed technical presentation that only he was familiar with.  So, his “handlers” reached out via email, cellphone, called his manager, used the company’s internal IM system – nothing.  He had vanished with just a few minutes to go before start time.

We began frantically looking for a substitute presenter – ANYBODY who might have seen his slide deck before and felt comfortable presenting on this topic.  No joy there either.  So our production team and the marketing folks from my client got ready for Plan B, which meant telling the audience our speaker had an emergency and that we’d have to reschedule.  As we hit our scheduled start time, I posted a message to all the attendees asking them to stand by for a few minutes as we were having technical difficulties (OK, I lied to buy time).   Attendees began streaming in – hundreds had registered for this event – and everyone on our pre-call began to panic as we hit five minutes past scheduled start.

Just as we were about to pull the plug on the event, someone located our missing presenter.  Where was he?  Was he OK?  He had simply had the event on his calendar for an hour after the actual start time, and was rushing to a phone where he could dial in.

He joined the call at 10 minutes past the hour, flustered and without benefit of logging in to the console to view the webcast live.  I told him to get ready, took my time with the introduction so he could gather his thoughts, and then I began to push his slides, letting him know what the audience was seeing as he presented from a printout of his deck.

We had planned for an hour webcast and now had to cram it into less than 50 minutes, so I gently rushed him along, quickly moving through his slides and managing to get to the end with about a minute to spare.  One audience question and we wrapped up.

Although the worst case scenario was avoided we lost several attendees waiting for him to arrive.  Our post-event email will invite all those who had to leave to view the event in archive, but certainly some damage was done.

SO… Best practice number one:  Contact your presenters 24 hours before the event and make sure they know when to be on the live call, and re-contact them once again an hour before to remind them.  If possible, have a backup presenter waiting in the wings to take over should an emergency arise.  And keep the aspirin handy.