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Re: Virtual Events - Is there any way for attendees to join early?
In my three test virtual events, the Join button wasn't available until the actual event start time. It's been a couple of weeks, so I will try another test - maybe a 2-minute lead time has been added, which does help a bit. Sure would be nice if a longer time could be added (10 or 15 minutes would be ideal for my audience, but we usually start our regular live webinars 30 minutes ahead, for the early birds). I'll watch for news - thanks!1.1KViews0likes0CommentsVirtual Events - Is there any way for attendees to join early?
Hello! We have scheduled a multi-day event in GoToWebinar, as a Virtual Event, which is new to us. Eight of our 13 sessions in the Event are pre-recorded/simulated live, and the other five will be live webcasts. We have run a few test events internally to see how things work, and have run into a problem where the sessions in the Virtual Event do not work like they would if they were independent webinars. We have come up with work-arounds (below), but they are not ideal, and I'm wondering if this might be addressed before our event begins in October. Please note that the problem is worse for prerecorded/simulated live sessions. Problem - we have found that for attendees, the "Join" button for any particular session only becomes available at the time the session is slated to begin. So if our session is scheduled from 1-2pm, attendees cannot join until 1pm (or after). In live webcasts that are not part of a Virtual Event, attendees can join early as long as the organizer has started the event, and in prerecorded webinars that are not part of a Virtual Event, attendees can join early and just wait for the recording to start (which happens automatically). For a live webcast session in a Virtual Event, we have found that the organizer can start the session early, but the attendees still don't see the "Join" button until 1pm. (This is different from a live webcast, where I can start the webinar 30 minutes early and everyone can join and then I simply start the broadcast at the stated time.) In this case, if I start the broadcast at 1pm, some attendees will not have joined yet, because it takes some time to connect. My work-around is to wait to start the broadcast for a few minutes to allow attendees to join, but this cuts into the actual education time. The problem is worse for pre-recorded sessions because those will start playing the recording automatically at the same time as the Join button becomes active. This means attendees will miss the first few minutes of the recording, while they are joining. (This is different from a regular simulated live/pre-recorded webinar, where attendees can join at any time and they are in a waiting room, waiting for the presentation to begin, and it automatically begins at the stated time.) We aren't able to start a pre-recorded event early, since we have no control over those. Our workaround is to change our start time to 12:55 (five minutes before the actual start time) and add 5 minutes of pre-recorded music to the beginning of our recordings, so the recording will play and the join button will become active at 12:55, but the real content of the recording won't start until 1pm, However, this gives attendees "only" 5 minutes to join (and our attendees are used to having much longer than that to get their ducks in a row), and it requires that we edit every recording to add the initial 5 minutes onto it. I hope this makes sense - any chance a "waiting room" will be added to sessions in a Virtual Event, like happens in regular live webcasts and prerecorded webinars? Thank you.Solved1.1KViews0likes2Comments