Item: GoTo Webinar
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We needed a way to bring new educational content to our audience. We use GoTo to host a monthly, a bi-monthly, and occasional paid commercial webinars. We initially charged non-members to view the webinars but the exposure to a larger audience during COVID made us change these to free for anyone. In addition to the live webinars, we also keep the recordings in a library for users to view later.

Pros and Cons

The webinars are easy to set up and schedule
Admin controls during the webinar are easy to use and pretty self-explanatory
Automatic recordings are great.
Attendee/registration reports are helpful

You can't blur your background when using a webcam. Zoom has been doing this forever and this seems like a pretty big omission.
Invited panelists can't test their screenshare/audio/video on their own so we have to schedule sessions to do this.
We have a lot of repeat speakers/panelists, not having the ability to save their information for easy access can be a pain.
You can't add hyperlinks or attach files to the automated attendee/registrant emails.
You only get one login per license and cannot substitute emails. This is a real pain if the licensed person needs someone else to run a webinar every now and then because only the licensed person receives the backup panelist invites. Even being able to add a cced individual to those emailed invites would be a big help.

Return on Investment

GoTo Webinar has been an excellent way to stay relevant and to get current topics/information to our target audience.
We usually get 100-200 attendees per session in a niche market, many are international attendees
The ability to get specific data from the audience via custom registration questions allows us to really focus on what they want to see.

Usability

It's almost perfect, I just need the ability to make someone else an admin every now and then when I am not available.

Alternatives Considered

Zoom Webinars

We looked at Zoom and actually did consider a move, but chose to stick with GoTo because we have an extensive library of videos and didn't want to transfer all of that. Plus we already knew the limitations so didn't want to move just for a few features only to be surprised by other things.

Key Insights

Do you think GoTo Webinar delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GoTo Webinar's feature set?

Yes

Did GoTo Webinar live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GoTo Webinar go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GoTo Webinar again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

GoTo Webinar is very well suited for our purposes. Our webinars consist of a panelists and at least one moderator and a Q&A session at the end. Panelists are able to use the screen share feature to run their own slideshows and the moderator can review questions that are typed in by the audience. We rarely have issues with performance and if these is an issue it's usually on the user side. We can also add our own custom questions to the registration page so that we can collect additional info from the audience. Post session emails can be scheduled to target attendees and people that registered but didn't attend. You can set these emails to include a recording of the session as well.

A downside is that you cannot embed links or attach files to those emails. We send out disclosure/conflict of interest statements to all attendees prior to the sessions starting and being able to include those as attachments in the reminder emails would be great. You cannot blur your webcam background. Almost all of our panelists want that option and they usually say "Zoom can do it" when I say it's unavailable.

GoToWebinar: it increased our audience and so can you

Overall Satisfaction with GoTo Webinar