One of the things that often frustrates vendors (that they don’t often talk about) is that their software is radically under-utilized. In my experience, it’s particularly true with those things that are webinar attention grabbers.
Here at V2, we don’t make the software that enables webinars, virtual events, hybrid events, or livestreaming – our job is to help you focus on the things that help you connect with your audience by taking the production work off your plate.
To that end, today’s spotlight is a few things that presenters rarely take advantage of on GoTo Webinar.
Present ALL your screens at once
GoTo uses the word “show” for screen sharing and makes it easy to choose which display you wish to share.
But what if you wanted, for instance, to keep showing PowerPoint AND do a live demo of navigating a website as part of your presentation?
You could obviously stop sharing PowerPoint and switch to the website, or you could show “all screens” at once.
Switch which screen you share on the fly
Let’s say you don’t want to show all screens at once for some reason (for me, I have three screens, and want to keep one private).
In GoTo you can switch which display to share without stopping sharing.
So in the above use case, switching between showing PowerPoint and a demonstrating a website doesn’t require dropping PowerPoint out of full-screen mode or similar tactic. Instead, you cleanly just go to the control panel and choose a different screen.
View (and respond to) an “Attentiveness” meter
When in a room with people, you easily see if attention has changed. But what do you do online?
GoTo Webinar’s Dashboard panel shows you an Attentiveness meter which works by detecting, for each attendee, whether or not GoTo Webinar is the active application on their computer.
BONUS TIP: Don’t worry about the exact figure – it’ll never be 100% (just like in-person audiences!). But do just glance at it to notice changes and respond accordingly.
“Undock” the Chat, Questions, and/or Attendee panel
It’s hard to respond to an audience in real time if you can’t “hear” what they are saying. GoTo enables you to undock or “pop out” important panels so that you can keep an eye on them.
Importantly, you can also resize and reposition them. My favorite tactic with the Questions panel is so powerful that I’m going to give it a point all to itself (see the next point).
BONUS TIP: Don’t worry about watching Questions all the time. Learn to glance there like you would glance at the dashboard of your car.
Resize the column width of an undocked Questions panel
Like resizing the width of an Excel column, GoTo Webinar’s Questions panel lets you resize the columns to something that suits you.
For me, when presenting I don’t care about the time the question arrived or if someone else on the backstage team has answered it. I resize the columns to make it easier to see longer questions (while still being able to see the name of the person…it’s always useful to be real by responding to real people by name!).
The bottom line
These few feature call outs are the beginning, not the end of cool things you can do with GoTo Webinar.
More importantly, they enable you to present more smoothly and engage more effectively.
The question on the table, as always, is “Do you just want to talk over PowerPoint or do you want to connect with people in a more engaging manner?”
The good news is that when you want to grow, lesser-known GoTo Webinar features can help you get there, which is exactly what our program managers help you do when you trust us with producing your virtual and hybrid events.