Not so much a question as a feature request. (I thought we had a category for that.) Please add the ability for an organizer to allow a specific panelist (or all panelists) to view ALL question...
This is an old, well-known request. But it needs to be hammered into the heads of product management on a daily basis until they finally change it.
You simply HAVE to change authority levels so that panelists can see attendee questions. I regularly work webinars with a moderator, three or four speakers, and maybe two people helping behind the scenes to prioritize and answer submitted questions. Currently I am forced to make all of them organizers just so they can work with the question panel.
That means I have 7 people who accidentally start my broadcast before I'm ready. 7 people who accidentally hit Exit-End Meeting instead of Exit-Leave Meeting. 7 people who have a checkmark on Start Recording Automatically, when I actually want to start the recording manually. It's a disaster. Don't force me to give everyone on the team permission to control the entire session just so they can see questions.
[Associated/alternate product design idea - Move those session controls somewhere else where they are not prominently displayed to all organizers. Record on Start, Start Broadcast, and End Meeting are too powerful to spread around the display, next to other frequently-used items. Put them in their own command menu separate from all the other stuff. ]
I usually have one or two people working the questions who are Organizers.
The reason I would not want to make the Presenters/Panelists see the questions is because there are many questions or comments that do not pertain to them. We get lots of "thanks" comments and comments about audio quality or comments that have nothing to do with the webinar. I do not want my presenters to spend time reading the comments that they do not need to see.
Copying questions from the Question box and pasting them in the Chat box and sending them to the Panelists works great for us.
Your needs may be different, but I would not want nor use the feature you desire.
Great to get other viewpoints, Chris. It's important to recognize that there are many different needs and use cases. I recognize that software design is hard for vendors attempting to satisfy everyone's preferences.
I would have a problem employing your workflow on larger webinars, particularly involving numerous people working behind the scenes. The question panel allows important controls such as setting priority flags, seeing which questions have been answered, and assigning questions to named speakers. If we're trying to copy and paste questions into the chat panel, we lose all that. There's a delay while finding questions and doing the copy/paste.
The chat fills up with tons of chatter about "I think that's a good one." "You mean Mary's?" "No, Jim's" "The one Jim just wrote about pricing?" "No, the earlier one about capabilities."
Then when I need to type an important message to a presenter, like "Louder Please" or "5 Minutes Left" it gets scrolled out of view and lost in the chatter.
I really do think the ability to work on individual questions in a structured interface is useful. I just would like to be able to assign more members of the team to do so without worrying about giving them other session-level power.
Probably the right way to satisfy both of us is to make the ability to work with the question panel an assignable capability that is not tied directly to Panelist/Organizer role. You could even give it to assistant triage people who log in as Attendees because they never need to speak. Then we can both work in the ways we want, with complete flexibility.
You taught me something. I did not know you could assign questions to a panelist. We have always used copy and paste. I must have missed the memo when that feature rolled out. Thanks