AirVent seminar attendees share their highlights

By Paul Scelsi, AirVent.

Of the favorite content at the air vent seminar, field-generated tips tops the list!

Every winter we hit the streets with our educational seminar Attic Ventilation: Ask the Expert™, offered free to roofing professionals across North America. Ever since it kicked off in 1998, the focus of the program has been collecting and sharing best practices, tips, solutions and mistakes to avoid in attic ventilation. In our recent podcast episode, I highlighted three of the most favorite and useful content segments from the seminar as told to me by past attendees.

1 - Bundled together from across North America

By far, the single most useful aspect of the seminar’s content, I’ve been told, is the fact that the tips and solutions are collected from across North America, bundled together and delivered directly to the attendee wherever the attendee happens to be. That could be an in-person seminar in a hotel in Chicago. It could be a private virtual seminar for a roofing company prearranged with us. Or it could be the filmed in-person seminar condensed to the absolute key points on our YouTube channel. We bring this wealth of industry-wide knowledge straight to you. That’s information we’ve gathered from the north, the south, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest and the west coast.

We made a commitment decades ago to actively engage with the industry to collect and share tips. Much of our collecting happens during day-to-day communication, including email, our website, social media, our podcast and old-school phone calls. Some of our best-received seminar content is the result of our one-on-one phone conversations troubleshooting tricky roofs to ventilate.

2 - A small dose of building science

Another seminar content favorite, according to past attendees, is there’s just enough building science discussed to drive home key points without boring the audience. We show how air moves through an attic most efficiently. We show what helps the air movement and what hinders the airflow. And we explain why. We also point to third-party references to support the information.

As the host of the seminar, a neat perspective for me is not only do I know what content is most useful and interesting because audiences tell me, I also witness their reactions to the content. One clear sign the content hits home is when I see the cell phones pop up during our in-person seminars. That’s when attendees snap a photo of certain PowerPoint slides on the big screen displayed in the front of the room. Many of those key slides are captured in our YouTube video of the seminar.

See the full article about the third most beneficial seminar content on our website. And to listen to our podcast episode on this topic, visit our YouTube!

3 - From the field for the field

The third most beneficial seminar content is the real-world examples from the women and men working in the field. We are relaying to audiences the from-the-field pain points as well as the success stories in residential attic ventilation. These field examples come from roofing contractors, remodelers, homebuilders, architects, home inspectors, building code officials, insurance adjusters and building materials wholesalers and retailers. They all participate in the seminar and share their experiences with AirVent so we can then share them with audiences. And because AirVent talks with homeowners year-round, we mix in some “from the perspective of the homeowner” into our seminar content.

AirVent seminars happen between every January and April in 30 to 40 cities across North America. You can find more information on our website, www.gibraltarbuildingproducts.com. You can find the video of our filmed in-person seminar both on our website and our YouTube channel. The video is titled “Attic Ventilation Educational Video 3rd Installment.”

About Paul Scelsi

Paul Scelsi is marketing communications manager at AirVent and leader of its Attic Ventilation: Ask the Expert™ seminars. He hosts the podcast, “Airing it out with AirVent,” and he’s the chairperson of the Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association Ventilation Task Force.