Does the job, but is pricey
Updated August 25, 2019
Does the job, but is pricey
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ON24
We are a nonprofit organization focused on supporting teachers with free resources and training. We currently use ON24 for our monthly webinar series. It is primarily used by two departments, but that is because it has been daunting for staff in other departments to learn the functionality. There are two teams and about 5 people now who know how to use ON24, and they support all the other staff in presenting when the need arises.
- Training
- Easy set-up. Once we created our first webinar, we were quickly able to just copy it for subsequent webinars and keep all of the same registration features, widgets, etc.
- The Q&A feature (and the ability to prioritize questions) is well structured so that the person producing the webinar can quickly filter the most pressing questions to the top for easy access for the presenters.
- Good data output at the end. It is easy for us to pull reports on attendance, particularly how long people stayed on the webinar, which we need to do after each webinar.
- We have a need for breakout rooms for our training. I understand this may be possible with an add-on, but it would be great if it was included in the standard elite package. We also host online courses, and webinars where we need attendees to converse and work with other attendees. We currently do those through Zoom or via Google docs, but it would be great if it was centralized within ON24
- We'd like to be able to organize items in the resource widget better. We sometimes upload many resources, and it's difficult for attendees to find what they're looking for quickly.
- Our most important need is to be able to send follow-up emails (and certificates) on our schedule--not simply upon completion. The goal of our webinars is for people to take what they learn and apply it in their classrooms and share what they learn with others. They need time to do that, so we want to survey them 2 weeks after they've taken the webinar to see if they've done it, and then give them the certificate.
- We'd like more opportunities to email people on a schedule of our choosing - not just pre and post. It would be great if we could automate follow-up emails so that they always went out 3 months, 1 year, etc. after the webinar.
We do not have any such integration currently. We do use Salesforce as our membership database, however, most of our audience for the monthly webinars does not come from membership, so they would need to be added to the database in order to take advantage of some of this functionality it sounds like.
- We have been able to host larger webinars (our previous platform had a registrant cap of 500).
- We are able to train people consistently and effectively. Comparatively fewer people have technical difficulties accessing the content.
- We are able to share the webinars both live and on-demand which greatly increases viewership (more people watch on-demand for us).
- GoToWebinar and Zoom
ON24 seems to have more functionality and are a more pleasing user interface than GoToWebinar, but to be honest, I think we're using it in primarily the same way. I was not the decision-maker for selecting ON24. If I had been, I'm not sure I would have selected it given the cost-benefit ratio. We're currently using ON24 in roughly the same way that we used GoToWebinar, but we're just paying thousands more. This year we were pushed by the ON24 salesman to renew for 2 years, but we opted to sign on just for 1 because we'd like to conduct a more thorough search to see if we can find a less expensive product that includes some of the extra functionality we're looking for, such as timed certificates and follow-up emails, break-out rooms, and opportunities for deeper, more robust audience engagement during the webinars.