The Enabling change and innovation webinar series commenced in 2012 when the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries wanted to build the capabilities of the FutureBeef team of about 30 staff across Queensland, so they would be aware of new approaches and concepts around enabling change and innovation.
However we realised that it would be difficult to attract high calibre presenters with this small audience, so we opened it to a wider audience, thinking we might attract a few hundred across Australia. To our surprise we attracted over 2000 people almost 40 different countries (though mainly Australia, New Zealand and Canada).
A total of 22 topics were presented and we were privileged to hear from presenters across Australia, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Canada. The topics have ranged from new approaches for enabling change (such as Community-Based Social Marketing and the Agricultural Innovation System approach) to monitoring and evaluation. While many attended live so as to be able to ask their questions live, others were happy to watch the recordings later. One recording has been viewed over 25,000 times (The seven secrets of good monitoring and evaluation with Jess Dart).
A detailed meta-evaluation showed that the knowledge level of the attendees regarding the webinar topic moved from 4.7/10 to 7.2/10, a cumulative change of 25%. Their level of confidence to use the content moved from 4.6/10 to 6.8/10, a cumulative change of 22%. They rated their overall satisfaction with the content at 8.0/10, delivery at 8.4/10 and overall effectiveness of the events at 8.1/10, as detailed in this REIS journal article.
The webinar series concluded in 2016 and the list of topics is shown below. You can still see all the webinar recordings over on YouTube.