GOTOWEBINAR
Online meetings and webinars have become a new normal to meet with our colleagues and get Gyan from global speakers. Webinars also help you build & engage with your audience. This can be used as an incredibly powerful sales tool, as well.
Due to the corona pandemic, most of us are locked inside and connected over the internet. In the past few weeks, I have used multiple platforms to host meetings including GoToWebinar. Every platform has common functionalities with some uniqueness.
I used GoToWebinar for multiple webinars and here is my experience.
Easy setup
To signup, you need to just provide your email ID and create a password. Then log in and you can see the dashboard. GoToWebinar has a quite intuitive dashboard with a clean interface. On the left, all the webinar options available.
On the dashboard, you can check upcoming and past events, plus on the right, you can check the calendar and scheduled webinars. On the dashboard, you can also see the analysis of your past organised events, such as registrants, attendee and attendance rate.
As you scroll down, you can check the recording of the webinars. And below that, you can create a channel this let you promote or curate and share your event recording by adding them to your public or private channel.
Plan, schedule and broadcast
Are you ready to go live? GoToWebinar makes it quite easy, just plan your next web meeting and schedule as per your requirements. There are two ways to broadcast –
One Live webinar and second you can share a recorded video message with your audience. Next, you can decide to make the session interactive where every attendee can talk to the panellists.
Another option let you broadcast discussion happening among panellists.
In both situations, you can add panellists who can share their screen or documents as well as interact using their webcams.
Application setup
You don’t need to set up the GoToWebinar application on your device. Whether you are admin, panellist or attendee, when you click on the link it asks to download and install the application on your PC or mobile device. Once installed, you don’t require any setup, just let it access your camera and mic.
Admin can log in to the web portal to set up the meetings and share links with panellists and attendees to join the webinar. The application only gets activated when you start the meeting for admins.
When admin adds email IDs of panellists, they receive an email with a link to join the meeting. It also lets you set the calendar for the same. Each panellist receives a different URL to join the same webinar, however, for attendees, there is one common link that admin can share with a selected audience.
Forget about boring webinar invitations, with GoToWebinar you can customise your invitation and make it more interactive. You can add your logo or relevant image to the invite with a custom message for your audience.
Admin can make the session more interactive by adding polls and surveys. Also, the question and chatbox can be used to interact with the panellists and organisers of the meeting.
Tracking
GoToWebinar enables you to track each attendee and their data including name, email, etc. There is one default sign-in form, that can be customised as per your requirements to collect more or targeted info of your audience.
This is only one part of tracking, GoToWebinar does more for your analysis. The analytical report helps to monitor audience, for instance, you share the invitation with 500 people out of those how many registered and then out of total registrants how many joined the webinar. It goes even one step further and let you analyse how many attendees were attentive during the meeting.
The analytics dashboard shows you an overall perspective of done webinars, for deep dive you can select a webinar and find out in detail. Here you download your report for future analysis as well as comparison to future improvements. The report is available in graphical representation plus you can download them in CSV/excel file formats.
If you have run any poll and survey you can see the results of both. Also, Q&A results will be available in this section.
Record each meeting automatically
GoToWebinar lets you record your webinars without any hassle. By default, the meeting gets recorded in your account when you broadcast the webinar. These recordings can be downloaded for further activities or you can share the video link with your colleagues and others.
Also, the platform lets you edit the video and transcript. There is one more option called “Download Video Report”. This report includes email ID and some other details of the viewers who watched your recorded video.
Set everything as per your needs
GoToWebinar tried to add as many possible easy options for each user. The “Setting” button further help you to customise the platform as per your requirements. Here you can change settings for your audio, registration, webcam, recording, etc.
Performance – What’s amazing and what will disappoint you
Setting up a webinar with multiple polls, surveys and panellists is a breeze. You can do that quite easily on the clean dashboard. Even if you forgot a few things or your plan changed at the last moment, editing can be done without any worry.
Polls can be run any point of time, and then share the results with your audiences. Q&A section let attendee ask questions and get the solution right in that particular window or the speaker can pick the question and answer that.
Chatbox lets you interact with everyone, organiser, panellists, admin and attendees. You can send a private message to only one person, a group of panellists and organisers, or with the entire audience.
The streaming goes stable, I have not experienced any freezing or crashing issue till date. The video recording is automated so you can focus on other important things.
Enough amazing things to choose GoToWebinar! Wait, this also has some drawbacks though the UI is simple yet it’s clunky. The application has got numerous updates but the window still has some old school design which sometimes troubles as well.
I face an issue with Q&A part, you can see multiple options from Audience View, Sharing, Webcam to Chat options. When you click on one, it opens the panel where you can check the details and perform tasks like a poll. These panels can be undocked and resized. But if you wish to operate Questions panels without undocking, it would show you a single pane with texts. In case of multiple questions, you cant easily check them, it’s advisable to undock the panel for a better experience.
Another challenge is organisers can’t get an idea about the viewing experience of your audience. Tough, you can control them still can’t see the screen. On organiser’s desktop, it can look different especially when presenter or panellists share their screen and webcams. Thankfully, GoToWebinar manages that part very smartly and attendees get the best viewing experience.
What was the main pain point! Using the application on Mac. Apple devices look for different approvals and every software behave a bit differently on iOS. Windows and Android devices run smoothly with GoToWebinar for organisers and panellists, but setting up the application on iOS to share your screen or webcam, you are going to face some difficulties.
Bottomline: Simple to use, clean interface and easy to manage functions, these are some strengths of the platform. But it’s not the best one, with clunky application interface and compatibility issues on iOS devices, it still needs improvements.