Chat Ability for All Attendees

[Jean2]

Can you have attendees in GoToWebinar talk or text "chat" to each other during a live 500 attendee event??

If you can't - PLEASE - change it so they can. It is terrible that there is no way to have the attendees interact with each other -

We have a weekly webinar on the same day, and same time EVERY week. Our clients like to be able to come to the event and interact with each other - and with the GoToMeeting there is no way to do that.

Only the organizer can see the "Questions" from attendees.

Let us know if there are plans to FIX this, thanks!

[Mel McMurrin1]

I agree this is a needed feature. At least a single group chatroom anyway. (A 1000 attendee dropdown list for private chat would be cumbersome!) As a work-around, we run a simultaneous Twitter chat with a hashtag (also could do a Facebook chat.) This not only solves the problem, but has added marketing benefits (assuming you want a public conversation.) You can make Twitter stream visible on your screenshare in GTW. Requires a dedicated Tweeter/organizer for large webinars.

[datachick]

That's what we try to do, But many enterprise environments block of forbid access to social media during working hours. Then there's the issue that not all our target audience uses social media.

We are trying to make our webinars engaging, Having to point them to some place outside the webinar is less than engaging.

We don't need to support Private messages. Just public chat. So sharing with ALL is fine.

[Steve20]

I specifically do not want this feature unless it could be turned off as a default. I want to be able to see my customers' comments. And I know that competitors sometimes join calls and I don't want them to be able to contact my customers privately.

[Kim N.]

Same, we just got our licenses last week and the lack of chat capability is extremely disappointing. We are having our first live webinar tomorrow, and I fully expect there to be complaints about the lack of collaboration opportunities. 

I can't believe this was requested TWO years ago and there hasn't been any movement. Can we at least get it in beta? Twitter is not a good alternative if we are having a sensitive conversation, and I have no desire to learn Twitter.

[Mel McMurrin1]

Kim,
Another workaround : Promote all your attendee to panelists. Cumbersome yes. But at least tomorrow's webinar can have chat interaction. Here's how: http://support.citrixonline.com/en_US... It's unclear if there is a 24 panelist limit if you add during webinar. I read this as there is not, but am suspicious. I would call support to verify. We've only done a handful at a time. You will likely want to start your webinar early so you can promote as many people pre-webinar as possible, and probably have a dedicated organizer watching for new attendees arriving to promote. Hope this helps. This oversight by Citrix is a pity.

[Kim N.]

Hi Mel,
Thanks for the recommendation. It wouldn't be too cumbersome for us because our webinars will be a fairly small number of attendees, but if someone connects on mobile, I can't promote them to panelist. Also, I read that we cannot mute panelists, that they would have to do it themselves...I'm not sure we want to give up that control! I contacted my sales rep to ask if they've made any progress on this. Alternatively, we could use GoToTraining so may look into that for our next webinar if it still has the mute capability. Will take some thinking, which is really quite silly - thanks, Citrix, for making me use my brain! 

[David Casaceli]

One more up-vote for attendee chats please!

[Jason Bailly]

One more vote for this capability

[Meg Cramer]

We're looking for some folks who can share more about how they use chat in their webinars. If anyone on this thread is interested, please reply to this post and we will get in touch next week. We appreciate the feedback on this topic!

[Jessica Johnson1]

I'm very interested. I have a 250-person project team. Because of our size, we use GoToWebinar instead of GoToTraining. But the team is all working together and team interaction is really important to us. We're currently using a HipChat room during meetings because GoToWebinar is unable to fulfill this need. Not everyone figures out how to get into the HipChat room - or doesn't want to open 2 things at once - so we miss having the whole team together. Happy to further discuss our use case if you're working on this!