Chat Ability for All Attendees

Yep, G2W only has chat for staff, not attendees.

Not a great work-around, but we do sometimes use Q&A  for open-ended comments when I have a presenter who really wants the audience to share (e.g. "chat").  You usually need at least a couple of admins managing it, especially if at all high volume.

On my last one, we explained to attendees (repeatedly) the instructor at time would request feedback and to type answers in the question pane.  Hosts would "reply" with a single character, usually a period, to "publish" to everyone OR hosts would skim and verbally share responses.  Since the Q&A pane would be full of comments, if they had a true question, start it with Q: or Q-.

On that last one, I had 400+ attendees and a presenter who asked for comments about 5 times plus lots of real questions.  It took 3 of us to keep the question pane cleared.

It's not perfect by any means, but is a way to add more interactivity similar to chat.

Note - one thing that can get confusing is that a STAFF member (Organizer/Panelist) can send a message directly to an individual attendee. And the attendee can respond. If this happens:

• Response shows up in Chat Window on staff side
• Attendee's Q&A pane gets re-labeled Q&A/Chat (or something like that; the word "chat" appears . At least it used to.)

However, attendees don't have true chat capability; this is private messaging from a webinar staff member  to/from  a specific attendee.

GoToMeeting has that feature, but GoToWebinar does not.

This has been discussed here as a program improvement to allow webinar Organizers the ability to turn On and Off the ability for the Attendees to chat.  This was not an issue years ago, but in a modern virtual meeting, people expect to be able to chat.

Does GTW have a feature that allows attendees to chat among each other?  To share ideas, enable discussion, etc.?  

Attendees can not chat amongst themselves within GoToWebinar. It has been discussed here many time.  You can use an external chat system like Twitter or Padlet.

We have a webinar and really want the attendees can chat to all but it seems like it not possible? I went through the messages about that from last years. It looks like it didnt work while back then...not sure it has changed now?

I respect your desire, but I and a lot of other GoToWebinar Organizers  do not expect to have a chat feature built into GoToWebinar.

If they do add the feature, it would be nice to be able to turn it on or off.

I can not believe that there is no chat function for your webinar.

I have used 4 other webinar programs and all of them have chat.

I have to resort to an external program to use chat.  

Do you really think that not having this feature makes you competitive?

I like the idea of an option for attendees to chat with each other.  We looked at GoToTraning and it doesn't fit our needs as well as GoToWebinar.  Often we have smaller groups on a discussion-based webinar and we unmute their lines (individually, which is time-consuming, but that's another issue).  It would be very helpful to have the option to allow attendees to chat with each other so they could share resources and tips while someone else is talking.

Hi itomlinson ,

We do have an existing thread on this topic, which I have merged now.  Regarding the timeline for development, we don't have any updates yet and will certainly let everyone know as soon as information becomes available.