Run a webinar
Broadcast to a large audience that watches rather than talks, with registration, chat and promotion to the stage. Available on the Growth plan.
- events
- webinar
- live
A webinar is the other live format. Instead of everybody on camera, you and your presenters broadcast, and the audience watches, chats, and raises a hand if they want to speak.
What is different from a room
The audience is not on camera, so a large one does not turn into a wall of faces.
People register rather than just turning up, and everybody who registers can be added to an audience, so your automations can follow up.
You can promote somebody to the stage when they raise a hand, and take them back off it.
There is a public watch link, so a webinar can be the thing you advertise.
What it costs
Growth includes 150 viewer hours a period. Forty people watching for thirty minutes uses twenty of them. Past that, a webinar stops unless you have turned overage on in Settings and set a spend cap, and the presenters count against the live participant allowance separately. If you own more than one community, they share these hours.
Cards under the video
Up to three cards can sit under your broadcast while you are live, so you can point the audience at something to buy, book or sign up for without stopping the show. Each card has an optional title (60 characters), a line or two of text (140), a button label (24, required) and one place to send people.
Where a card can go: a product, a 1:1 session, a form, a page, another event, a guide, an offer, a payment link, your store, your blog or a post, or any web address. Courses are left out, because a public webinar can admit people who are not members.
A product, a session or a form opens over the video. A product (and a session, when you pick buy here) opens checkout or the time picker in a sheet, and a form opens in a sheet, while the video keeps playing. Each of those cards also has Open in a new tab. Any other card opens a new tab. A form that sells something, or that has a response limit, opens in a new tab too.
On phones the cards show as a strip under the player, in your community's colors.
To set them up, open the webinar's editor and find the Offers & marketing row above Options. It is closed by default, and it only appears for a webinar hosted in Drry on Growth. Press Add a card, fill it in, drag to reorder, and press Save cards. A brand-new event needs its first save before cards can be added.
Afterwards
Attendance is measured: how many watched, how long a typical person stayed, and everybody's watching time added up. The recording can be published for replay, and added straight into a course module if the session was really a lesson.
Common questions
Do viewers need to be members?
Not necessarily. A webinar can be run for members, for an invited list, or sold by ticket.
Can I stream to YouTube or Facebook at the same time?
No. Delivery is to your own audience, on your own community.
Is the replay gated?
Recording replay is for members, even when a guest was let into the live session on an invitation. The way to let a guest watch is a private link or email from the ended event. See Recordings and replays.
Follow up automatically
Build the reminders and the follow-up once and let them run. See Time emails around an event. For a webinar that repeats every week, see Run an automation for every session of a recurring event. The Webinar follow-up template is a good place to start.