Webinar Features

Additional Features of Zoom Webinar

Contents

• Host controls & participant management for Webinars
• Webinar registration & scheduling
• Webinar branding, emails, & streaming
• Q&A vs. chat features
• Webinar reporting
• Webinar best practices

Host Controls & Participant Management in a Webinar

There are multiple roles available for a webinar: host, co-host, panelist, and attendee. The role that participants have in the webinar will be designated by the host.

• The host of the webinar is the user who the webinar is scheduled under. They have full permissions to manage the webinar, panelists, and attendees. There can only be one host of a webinar. The host has various in-session controls, such as stopping and starting the webinar, muting panelists, disabling panelists’ video, removing attendees from the webinar, and more.
• Co-hosts share many of the controls that hosts have, allowing the co-host to manage the administrative side of the webinar, such as managing attendees or starting/stopping the recording. The host must assign a co-host. Co-hosts cannot start a webinar. If the host needs another Zoom user to start the webinar, they can assign this person as an alternative host.
• Panelists are full participants in a webinar. They can view and share video, screen share, annotate, speak to the attendees, and more. You must be assigned panelist permissions by the webinar host. The host can also disable some features for panelists, including starting video, sharing your screen, and recording. Panelists can be invited to participate in the webinar using only their name and an email address, a Zoom account is not required.
• Attendees are view-only participants who can be un-muted if the host chooses. Their view of the webinar is controlled by the host. They can interact with the host and the panelists through the Q&A and chat features. Learn about joining a webinar as an attendee by visiting Joining and Participating in a Webinar (attendee).

For more on how to manage attendees and panelists, see Zoom’s support page.

Webinar Registration & Scheduling

Webinars can require pre-registration before the event. The host can either automatically approve all registrants or manually approve each one. The host can add custom registration questions and generate reports on these registrations as well.

• Scheduling a Webinar with registration requires your registrants to complete a brief form before receiving the link to join your webinar. This allows you to collect the names, email addresses, and other information from the registrants. You can choose to automatically approve anyone who registers or manually approve attendees.
• With Webinar registration, registrants can be imported via CSV and automatically approved. Once they have successfully been imported, a confirmation email will be sent to the registrants.
• You can customize the registration for webinars, by approving attendees, enabling email notifications for registrations, adding registration questions, and more.
• Scheduling a webinar without registration will allow attendees to join without needing to sign up in advance. Attendees will be required to enter their name and email address upon joining.
• Similar to a meeting, Zoom allows you to schedule recurring webinars during specific dates and times. You can schedule a webinar to occur daily, weekly, or monthly.

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Webinar Branding, Emails, & Streaming

You can customize your webinar registration page with a color scheme, title, banner, logo, and speaker information, including descriptions and profile pictures for up to three speakers. Users can customize these settings when you schedule a webinar that requires registration. Customizable settings for webinars include:

• Title
• Banner
• Logo
• Speaker information
• Theme
• Post attendee URL
• Post webinar survey
• Social media description

With webinar branding, you can customize the emails sent out to the panelists, registrants, attendees, and absentees of the webinar.

If configured, you can live stream a webinar to a custom platform. If you configure this before the webinar, you can begin streaming with one click after your webinar begins.

Q&A vs. Chat

The Question & Answer (Q&A) feature allows attendees to ask questions during the webinar and for the panelists, co-hosts, and host to answer their questions. Answers can be provided by typing in the answers or choosing to “answer live”. With the public Q&A feature enabled, attendees can answer each other’s questions and also up-vote each other’s questions.

The Chat feature allows webinar attendees, the host, co-hosts, and panelists to communicate for the duration of the webinar. Whether attendees can chat with everyone or only the host will depend on the settings that the host has selected.

With higher volume webinars, Q&A is suggested as a better way to keep inquiries organized.

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Webinar Reporting

Webinar Reports* allows users to generate different metric and information reports including:

• Registration: Displays a list of registrants and their registration details.
• Attendee: Displays details about each attendee.
• Performance: Displays engagement statistics on registration, attendance, and feedback.
• Q&A: Displays questions and answers from the webinar.
• Polling: Displays each attendee’s poll result.

These reports can be exported in a .CSV format for further analysis.

*NOTE: Webinar Reports must be generated before your online Webinar event reservation expires. Please generate reports while you have the temporary license applied to your Zoom account.  Once the reservation time is over and your Zoom account returns to a regular Zoom Pro account, you will not be able to access webinar reporting for the event.

For step-by-step instructions on how to extract reporting data, please see Zoom’s page on Webinar Reporting.

Webinar Best Practices

See the Webinar Best Practices and Resources for great tips and tricks to set up and run your webinar with ease.

A Webinar Practice Session allows you and your panelists to get set up and acquainted with Zoom webinar controls before starting your webinar. The practice session can only be started by the host or alternative host. Attendees do not partake in the practice session.

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