Allow Panelist(s) to See All Questions

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Allow Panelist(s) to See All Questions

Allow Panelist(s) to See All Questions

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 questions.


Currently, must promote them to Organizer, which gives them the power to END the meeting.  I always warn them
when it's necessary to do this. I point out Exit Webinar vs End
Webinar should they need to withdraw from the session.  It has still happened by accident. 

It also gives them too many other powers, like ability to dismiss people.  Mostly it works out okay, until the curious "organizer" starts clicking on options!

62 Comments
GlennD
GoTo Manager

Hi @Jonathan Spence 

 

The dedicated Question and Answer feature is the best way to manage questions during a webinar, it allows you to answer questions in the order you choose, post the answer to the entire audience or just the attendee that asked it, and you can also assign specific questions to specific Panelists. 

 

For large events, it is best to have a dedicated co-organizer managing the Q and A and assigning the questions to the Panelists. Check out our new training resource for more tips: https://embark.logmeininc.com/#gotowebinar

 

 

klmonline
Contributor

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. ]

Chris Droessler
Respected Contributor

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.

 

klmonline
Contributor

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.

Chris Droessler
Respected Contributor

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

 

 

Mel-SoTSA
Active Contributor

I've been asking for a level between organizer and panelist for years  to do exactly what you specify. I think the "Sub-organizer" moniker already in use would be a good title since there is curretly very little difference between an orgnaizer and a sub-organizer.  It is nice to have a level like "Panelist" that does not see all the questions and comments though.

Keep asking!

Veerle-GenDx
Active Contributor

Great suggestion, I would like this feature too. It would be very useful for the panelist to see all questions. e.g. we use the panelist function for external speakers and they would like to see the questions that were asked as well.

Ken4
Frequent Contributor

This would still be my number one request. To me it's worse if a presenter who is made into an organizer starts the broadcast or ends the webinar only because I needed them to gain access to the question box. I'd lov to see them stay as panelist and see the q n a 

 

levipay
New Member

Hi,

 

Other webinar systems I have used have permitted organisers to open up the chat and/or Q&A, so attendees can see the questions others are posing.  This would be so helpful for some of the webinars I run. 

 

It would be even better if this was enabled together with the ability of attendees to 'upvote' the questions, so you could see at a glance which questions are most popular.

 

The absence of these features really counted against GoToWebinar when I weighed up the different webinar options on the market, and made it a much closer run than it should have been!

 

Thanks,

Levi

AshC
Retired GoTo Contributor

Hi Levi,

While GoToWebinar Organizers can make an Attendee question public one by one, the default behavior is for privacy in this regard.  

 

There is currently no function for 'upvoting', however you could make a Polling Question on the fly (while in session) which reflects a particular question asked.