The Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration (NTCA) hosted a webinar on the 1st of September. The webinar was attended by high number of participants from different IOTA member countries. Participants received useful information about conducting webinars and about the advantage of organizing webinars.
The NTCA webinar experts provided overview information about the different types, formats and specific characteristics of webinars. It included examples of the main types of webinars: it can be used for marketing and external communication purposes, for internal communication of an organisation or for delivering training. The NTCA experts advised that besides individual events, webinars could be used as supplementary elements: seminars could be combined with webinars (e.g. pre and post event webinars or “reverse webinar” when a speaker joins a seminar via webinar). Participants had the opportunity to raise questions via online chat and several questions were answered and further discussed by speakers. Participants were interested in the practical arrangements of organising a webinar, from the answers they learned that free software is available on the internet for conducting basic webinars as an alternative to the more advanced webinars requiring a professional support team and a studio. A poll was conducted during webinar in order to demonstrate how many purposes webinar can serve. The results of the poll were published, that is how participants learned that 43 % already use webinars in their organisation and 72 % thought that it should be part of the communication tool of the organisation.
The NTCA expert concluded the webinar with emphasising their positive experiences based on 20 webinars conducted since 2012: all participants were satisfied, managed to save costs, and interaction worked very well.
The webinar conducted by the NTCA was also considered for delegates of the recent 19th General Assembly of IOTA to demonstrate opportunities available for tax administrations in using webinars to communicate information to taxpayers and educate them for better tax compliance.
Organised prior to the forthcoming IOTA Tax Professional Learning and Development Forum to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 9 to 11 September 2015, this webinar was particularly targeted to the participants of the Forum who will continue sharing their experience and discussing the use of webinars, virtual classes and video for professional learning and development in tax administrations.
The webinar is still available on demand in the following link:
http://webinar.nl/ntca/#!/ntca/20150901_1