Yugma Adds Webinar Registration
Yugma put out a press release today announcing new pricing and product options. Buried in the text in one of the bullet points was a line stating “New Yugma Webinar option introduced at $19.95 per month for all Yugma Pro subscribers.” That interested me, as I tend to think of Yugma as more suited for collaborative meetings than formal webinars.
I went to their web site and looked for information on the webinar option, but couldn’t find anything about it. It must be really new! I finally gave up and called the sales department, where I talked to a friendly and helpful representative named Christian. The following features are based on our conversation… I haven’t had a chance to try out the new functionality.
The main enhancement you get with the webinar option is that when you schedule a webinar, the system builds a registration page for your event. Traditionally, you would schedule a Yugma meeting and get a log in link. It was your responsibility to send out the link to everyone you wanted to have attend. But now you can send out or post a registration link and let people sign up for the webinar.
There is a bit of customization possible on the registration page. You can upload your own logo or graphic to appear on the page. Yugma gives you a set of eight standard registration fields and you can choose which ones should appear on the registration form. You also get one additional free-form question to ask for another piece of data from registrants. You cannot change the name or order of fields as they appear on the registration page, and you cannot specify which fields should be optional or required. Christian had to do some checking, but found that the system establishes the following fields as required for registration: First Name, Last Name, Phone, Email, City, State. You don’t see any indication on the form that they are required… You simply get a warning message if you hit the register button without filling in all of them.
When a person registers, they get an automatic email message with instructions for joining the event. You cannot customize the text of the message that gets sent. There is also no provision for having the system send automatic reminder emails to registrants before the event.
Reporting consists of a registration report before the event and a report of attendees after the event. You can download these to spreadsheet format, but you have to manually cross-check the lists to see which registrants did and did not attend.
There are no new features in the meeting session itself for use in webinars. You are using the functionality of Yugma Pro to run the session.
The webinar option is an additional charge to whatever Yugma Pro account you subscribe to. You can pay monthly or subscribe for a year at a cost of $199.50 (equivalent to two months free).
I’d say they are moving in the right direction, but I’d still like to see a lot more customization and flexibility allowed in setting up the registration page and attendee communications. I’d also like to see better integrated reporting between registration and attendance.
