The Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) and the Department of Ecology may not have a lot in common, but what they do share is a challenge to communicate consistently with their employees located throughout the state.

Headquartered in Olympia, ESD supports workers during times of unemployment, tracks and analyzes labor market trends, and links businesses and job seekers to a diverse range of employment services provided by the state's WorkSource system. With offices located statewide, ESD needed an effective and cost-saving method to communicate consistently with all of its employees at the same time.

"Communicating with 2,200 employees at 45 locations throughout the state has been a real challenge," says Tim Mallon, ESD's Webcast Coordinator. "The DIS Webcasting service has helped us overcome this hurdle. Webcasting lets us reach all our employees with the same message all at once. "

"We used it for the first time last April to introduce our new Commissioner Karen Lee and Deputy Commissioner Paul Trause to the whole agency," says Mallon. "It gave employees the opportunity to meet with the entire ESD senior leadership team and hear their message all at the same time, and ask questions via e-mail. We held a second webcast in November, and we plan to hold two to three webcasts a year to communicate with employees."

The Department of Ecology also used the DIS Webcasting Service for the first time to communicate with employees and include them in the agency's 35th anniversary celebration. According to Julie Meier, an executive assistant at Ecology, "It was an opportunity for us to pilot webcasting and see how it would work for future activities that we initiate out of our headquarters building in Lacey. Trying to communicate with 1,498 employees at seven locations is difficult. We chose webcasting because we wanted to easily involve and communicate with all our employees at the same time, and save on travel and expenses. The DIS staff did an excellent job to make the webcast a success."

According to Renée Klosterman, DIS Multimedia Manager, webcasting is similar to a live television talk show. "We provide an on-site camera crew to tape the meeting or presentation and we webcast it live using the Internet," says Klosterman. "All your viewers need is a Web connection, free media player software, and the link to the webcast so they can watch it from the convenience of their desktops and interact live via e-mail with the presenters."

Webcasting is not just for internal communications. Other reasons to use it include:

• Hearings. Allow citizens from all across the state to watch panels of industry experts discuss important topics and issues without having to leave the comfort of their home or office.
  
  
• Services. Keep busy citizens up-to-date on what's happening at your agency. Citizens can simply logon and learn about important services your agency is offering in a visually compelling medium.
  
  
• Training. Increase your team's productivity while reducing travel expenses.
  
  
• Press conferences. Allow the media to view and listen to your announcement from the convenience of their office.The advantage to webcasting is that it helps you deliver a live, consistent message to your audience by using the Internet to distribute audio, video, multimedia presentations, and documents. Your viewers can interact with the presenters through e-mail, polling questions, online chat sessions and the telephone.

The other advantage is that you can archive the program on your Web site for on-demand use for those people who are unable to view the live event. This allows you the option to let your viewers continue to submit questions or provide feedback to the presenters. You can also transfer the program or presentation to CD, DVD or videotape.

More about the DIS Webcasting Service
"We provide a hands-on, end-to-end full webcasting service," says Klosterman. "We can webcast your program from our studio in Lacey, or from any location with a T1 or faster Internet connection. We can also encode any video program in the streaming format of your choice for on-demand viewing from your Web site, using the DIS streaming server."

To view examples of DIS work, check out the following customer webcasts:

Department of Ecology's 35th anniversary celebration webcast
National Association of Attorneys General Internet Law Conference webcast

This article was reprinted from TechNews, with permission from the Washington State Department of Information Services.