The Webinar Portal, a product of Southern Regional Extension Forestry (SREF) and winner of the 2011 USDA Forest Service’s Two Chiefs’ Partnership Award, is a “multi discipline” web platform used to promote and deliver live and on-demand virtual events and webinars focused on forestry, agriculture, conservation, climate science and other natural resource disciplines.

The Webinar Portal is highly customizable and adds a rich set of add-on features and participant workflow based processes to complement and extend standard virtual event delivery platforms such as Zoom, Adobe Connect, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, GoToWebinar, and AT&T Connect.

Whether your virtual event lasts for 1 hour or spans multiple days, the Webinar Portal platform offers the customization and flexibility needed to reduce delivery effort and cost all while maximizing your event's impact.

Impact

Today the Portal, hosts over 100 live professionally presented webinars per year and provides on-demand viewing of over 884 archived webinars.   Most webinars are provided free of cost to viewers and more than 112,000 webinar participants have received continuing education credits.  The Webinar Portal's impact is phenomenal with over 28,000 targeted subscribers and  the Portal's training has reached over 75,000 individuals with over 345,000 webinars viewed.

See our latest real-time impact results for yourself.

The Webinar Portal Platform

The Webinar Portal platform is a feature rich virtual event and webinar hosting platform with built-in workflow functionality to help webinar providers focus on providing content, not the logistics of marketing, certification, registration, survey's, testing, follow-up, ratings, feedback and impact analysis.  The Webinar Portal platform has the ability to:

• E-market your webinars to over 28,000 subscribers with interests in forestry, climate science, agriculture, conservation and other natural resources, in the US and across the world.
• Award continuing education credits for live events and for on-demand events up to one year or more following the initial live broadcast.
• Automatically generate participant certificates of completion.
• Calculate the economic, environmental, and behavioral change impacts of your webinar.

Organizations interested in utilizing the portal to produce and host virtual events and webinars are able to:

• Use their current webinar provider, including but not limited to, Adobe Connect, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and GoToWebinar.
• Archive their live events for on-demand viewing when it maybe more convenient for their participants.
• See the impact of their virtual events based on the environmental, economic, and behavior change data automatically collected by the portal.

The portal offers time saving workflow automation that provides a robust set of workflow processes that includes:

• Automated email marketing campaigns to over 28,000 targeted subscribers.
• Participant registration and "advance registration" functionality.
• Impact evaluation tools include:  customizable pre-survey,  'Green Saving' calculator, 5-star ratings & feedback, and customizable follow-up impact survey
• Application for continuing education credits from partnering organizations, automated generation and issuing of certificates of completion, and reporting participation to participating continuing education organizations.

The Webinar Portal platform is continually improved and enhanced to meet the growing online training and extension needs of professionals, researchers, educators, students and others with interests in the multi-disiplinary content served by The Webinar Portal. The platform is reviewed annually by a partner driven steering committee with the intent of recommending and initiating value driven enhancements with the greatest impact for both the webinar providers and viewers.

With growing training budget constraints and the need to reach an expanded audience in today's online society, The Webinar Portal offers the best online solution for cost effective, accessible and ease-of-use professional training and research extension.

Host Your Webinars on the Webinar Portal

To find out about hosting webinars on the Portal or to learn what the Portal has to offer you as a webinar provider, read our Webinar Provider Services Spec Sheet.

To find out more about hosting webinars, becoming a Webinar Portal partner or becoming a individual or corporate sponsor, contact Robert Bardon, NCSU Extension Forest Resources or Contact SREF at webinars@sref.info.

Professional Education Credits

We partner with multiple professional accrediting organizations from several different disciplines so that participants can keep up-to-date and earn credit towards their professional certification.  Here are some of the organizations we work with to offer CEUs:

Webinar Brands

Webinars hosted on the Portal are categorized based on discipline/profession and are managed through the Portals focus-branded Webinar Portals including:

Forestry and Natural Resources Webinar Portal

The Forestry Webinar Portal, a service of the USDA Forest Service, North Carolina State University Forestry Extension and other partners, focuses on  forestry and natural resource management targeting forestry and natural resource professionals, landowners and other interested in keeping up-to-date on the latest best practices and research.

Conservation Webinar Portal

The Conservation Webinar Portal, a service of the USDA National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), the NRCS East National Technology Support Center (ENTSC) and other partners, hosts the NRCS Science & Technology Training Library with the objective of providing national, regional and state natural resource conservation professionals with convenient online training on the latest natural resource conservation research and best practices.

Climate Science Webinar Portal

The Climate Webinar Portal, a service of the USDA Climate Hubs and other partners, includes a broad range of climate science topics and focuses to provide the latest research on climate trends and climate related environment effects for climate professionals, farmers and foresters.

BioEnergy Webinar Portal

The BioEnergy Webinar Portal focuses on information and education related to the bioenergy sector including plant growth and harvest to energy production.  While all sources of bioenergy are considered, cellulose based energy production from trees and other woody crops are the main focus.

Agriculture Webinar Portal

The Webinar Portal for Agriculture focuses on providing training and timely information related to agriculture extension, research and education.  The Agriculture topics cover plant pathology, crop and soil science, horticulture, animal and dairy science, poultry science, environmental science, entomology, food science, agricultural leadership, and agri-business.

Sponsors and Partners

The Webinar Portal was developed by Southern Regional Extension Forestry (SREF) through a partnership with North Carolina State University's Extension Forest Resources, Texas AgriLife Extension Service, the USDA Forest Service, the USFS Wood Innovations program, the USDA NRCS, the USDA NRCS East National Technology Support Center, the University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and other participating land-grant universities and professional accrediting organizations.

Development of the portal has been partially supported by The Renewable Resources Extension Act National Focus Fund Grant no. 2011-46401-31144 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.