Allow Q and A to be public and let attendees vote on questions

[levipay]

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]

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. 

[levipay]

Thanks, @AshC.  

Yes, but it is not really just "by default" that questions are private...there is no way to change this setting.  That's what I was suggesting should change. 

For some of my webinars, I receive a lot of feedback saying "I wish we could have seen the questions other people were asking" and, sometimes, I would like to at least have the option to switch that on.  It does exist as an option, I believe, in GoToTraining, so it must be possible, technically.

I hadn't thought of the polling on the fly option to achieve the 'upvoting' - although that would rely on having one or two people helping me deliver the webinar, as this isn't something I could do while presenting.  Also, I am not sure it quite as neat as upvoting.  It feels a little bit like I am exposing the people who asked the losing questions by doing it in a poll.

Other systems - like WebinarJam and BigMarker - just this open chat and upvoting stuff pinned down.  I chose GoToWebinar because, in other respects, the product wins through.  But it was a much closer call than it should have been, given that GoToWebinar doesn't have these increasingly standard options.

L.

[Webinar Studio]

I support this.  We get many presenters that would prefer to have the audience help decide which questions to cover during Q&A.  And instead of getting the same question over and over, they can just 'upvote' it. 

This could be a feature to turn on/off as needed.  Privacy doesn't have to be an issue because the attendees would only need to see the question but not who asked it. 

A great alternative would be to have two options for attendees - 

Ask a general, public question

Private question sent only to organizers

[Laelka]

I also get feedback from both presenters and attendees constantly on this. Biggest reason that we also use Zoom for webinars because the attendees cannot see the Questions coming in GoToWebinar. To compete with Zoom, GoToWebinar should absolutely create an option to allow attendees to see the Questions (just like we have one for them to see the attendee list) so we can decide for ourselves what level of moderation each session will have. Sometimes we want the Questions open, and sometimes we want it more closed. Would be nice to have a checkbox option.