New way to submit questions for events

We have launched a new way to submit questions before an event, check out the page by clicking here.

This is part of our Facebook page and it will allow you to submit your own question, see everyone else's and vote for your favourite to make sure that we ask the question that everyone is thinking about.

Jaqueline Simon Gunn, who we are interviewing on Sunday this week, is excited to be receiving questions in this way, feels exciting to get access to Jaqueline before the event and to continue the conversation after the chat room is finished.

To show our appreciation we will offer the person who leaves the question that gets the most votes one free DVD of their choice from our library.

If you are not on Facebook please send your question to Sandra using sandra@onlinevents.co.uk and we will post your question for you.

Looking forward to receiving your questions and getting the conversation started!

You can submit your question by clicking here.

First Facebook Advert!

We have received some feedback from the last few events about the need to get ourselves out there and seen, that people didn't know about us and are now glad that they have.

One of the challenges of this is the 'how', we are still spending more than we are making on events and that means that there is a limited budget for advertising. The holy grail of advertising in the professional magazines still feels like a distant dream.

So I thought we could try a different strategy and use a Facebook advert, I have been reading that there are now over 700 million people on Facebook and surely some of the people who would enjoy our events are on Facebook and would be interested in connecting with us there.

We have been running a Facebook campaign for the last few months exchanging a 'like' on our Facebook page for one months free access to our library and have been excited to have just over 100 people come along and join us in this way.

So I thought that offering a Facebook advert to let more people know about this campaign might be helpful, I selected the advert to display only to people who had stated on their profile that they are interested in either counselling or psychotherapy or both, and to only be shown to people located here in the UK and chose a modest amount of money to be paid to Facebook for everyone who clicked through to our page.

The results of this have been amazing! From late Friday night when the advert went live till Sunday late afternoon 65 people have come along and 'liked' our page. This feels like a fantastic increase and hopefully will mean that many more people will get exposure to our work.

Our passion at onlinevents is around feeling connected whether we are physically or digitally present and in that environment opening ourselves to learning and developing as professionals. Looks like Facebook has afforded us an opportunity to have that experience with a lot more people!

I would love to hear your experience of being on our page this weekend, have you been with us a while and noticed the increase in traffic, did you respond to the advert and exchange your 'like' for time in our library? I am wondering what you think of this way to connect, does it feel like we could build an expanding community in this way, will you be coming to one of our events?

The potential to connect like this also feels significant in terms of building a private practice and I am wondering whether anyone has used a Facebook page to create awareness of their counselling / Supervision work? Understanding social networking as a therapist feels tricky and important. All comments welcome!

Feel free to leave your comments below, and please join us at one of our upcoming events and spend some time with us in the chat room.

Oh ... I nearly forgot to say ... if you have 'liked' our page remember to send Sandra an email and we will get your free months membership sorted out asap!

John

Our first Facebook campaign

You may have noticed from my tweets and Facebook posts that we are attempting our first Facebook campaign.

We are hoping that the Facebook page can become a centre for the onlinevents community to keep the conversations going once events are finished and to get excited about upcoming events, but of course we need to let everyone know that the page is there!

The first obstacle is the address, currently it is this long and ugly URL http://www.facebook.com/pages/onlineventscouk/194002730635825?sk=wall&filter=1¬if_t=wall

To get a short and snappy address we need to have more than 25 people click the like button on our page, so we are offering everyone who "likes" our page one free months access to the onlinevents video library.

So, if you come along to our Facebook page, by clicking that long link above, and click the "like" button we will set you up with a months access to our library free of charge.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Relational Depth Week - 20th & 25th June, 2011

We have been working tonight on tickets to "Relational Depth" week, I will be interviewing Mick Cooper co-author of the book Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy

 on Monday the 20th of June.

And then on Sunday the 26th of June I will be interviewing Sue Wilders who has critiqued the aim of offering relational depth.

We hope that the interviews will be a way of further opening up debate and discussion and hoping this fuels our own exploration of what we offer as listeners and therapists.

For more details and a free ticket to view each of the events online please click the event title below.

Relational Depth: an authors perspective - Interview with Mick Cooper

Relational Depth: a critics perspective - Interview with Sue Wilders

OCTIA 2011

Just read Mieke Havenan's blog about the OCTIA conference and thought that I would attempt to write something, I am much better at the doing than I am at the writing :)

OCTIA is a conference about online counselling and it's the first event that onlinevents worked with to stream live to the Internet.


As a team we were really pleased with the event, felt for us like the technical expertise we have been developing over the last 2 years since the first OCTIA conference has finally come together into a rounded out and stable provision of live streaming, I was very proud of this and the hard work my team put into such an achievement!

The presentations were of course fantastic! Gill Jones helping us with website design, Tim Bond with ethical and legal dilemma's, Steph Palin talked to us about sex addiction and Kate Anthony introduced us to the future of online counselling. And it was very exciting to be delivering these presentations into our library just minutes after the presenters had finished!


The chat room remains at the heart of what we do, bridging the delegates in the room with those spread around the world online. To see the presenters and the delegates in the room engage with the online delegates never seems to lose it's 'in the moment' excitement for me, the ability to connect consciousness despite physical remoteness and share ideas, commitment and passion, just never seems to get 'old' for me!




Preparations have begun in earnest for next year and we are hoping to return to the Watershed in Bristol where we we very well looked after, excellent Internet access and all nestled in the lovely water front environment in Bristol. How could we resist to return again!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Anger events

As Sandra and I were working away a couple of weeks ago we realised we had a series on anger, the first event "Not your average anger management programme", our event a week today with Buck Black, and then on the 20th March "Anger, Rage & Relationship" with Sue Parker Hall.

So, we thought we needed a theme for this emerging series on anger and we put out a request on twitter and facebook for suggestions, with our favourite suggestion being used as the series title and a years free subscription to our video library offered to the person making the suggestion.

Here are some of the great ideas that came our way:

Transforming Anger Into Power

I'm Outta Here!

In Your FACE - Working With Angry Clients Offline

Look Back In Anger: Working With Anger Therapeutically

You Talkin' To ME?? Anger and the Therapeutic Relationship

When the bark bites. Anger can hurt.

Taming the beast

Beauty and the Beast

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness

Anger: The Royal Road To Congruence

And our favourite ... Transforming the beast 


Thanks to Annie Fallaize for such a great suggestion!

This is a great suggestion as it communicates to me something about the natural place of anger within us a humans and its potential to transform into something healthful and useful to us, congratulations to Annie who now has a years free subscription to our video library at onlinevents.co.uk

We currently have two events in our emerging series "Transforming the Beast", so if you would like to present your way of working with anger, a theoretical perspective or perhaps suggest an author for us to interview on the subject we would love to hear from you!

Hoping to see you at one of our upcoming events!

Couples Counselling

Couples Counselling

We released tickets for the person centred couples counselling presentation with Allan Turner & Kate Stubbings early Friday morning and in a little over 2 days 72 people have signed up to watch this event online.

This feels like an exciting development in the provision of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) events, offering free online access to learning experiences which also offer a taste of more extensive trainings. Allan and Kate describe their couples counselling training as unashamedly person centred, which sounds tantalising, yet how would i know if this is the training i should invest in?

Hopefully getting a sense of Allan & Kate as trainers through their presentation, demonstration and if you can come to Sheffield, over a coffee, can offer a real feel for their in depth training.

Person Centred Couples Counselling - Presentation and demonstration by Allan Turner & Kate Stubbings

onlinevents.co.uk is pleased to offer this event in partnership with Temenos and Counselling Works Ltd.

If you have a training that you would like to offer a taste of via a presentation or an online interview, please contact onlinevents.co.uk by emailing sandra@onlinevents.co.uk