GoToMeeting

We tried GoToMeeting to meet with some of our top donors in order to review our quarterly reports and let them know how their donations are being spent and looking for feedback from them. Normally this entails many phone calls and emails over the course of a month. This made the choice to try GoToMeeting easy but the big question was “How easy will it be for our donors to join in from home?”. Many of them are senior citizens and only half of them had microphones readily available at their PC’s so we opted to use a phone conference in conjunction with the meeting as opposed to using the VOIP that comes with GoToMeeting (participants who wanted to speak would need to have a microphone on their PC and as I said some of them could not find their microphones.)

We sent everyone their meeting invitations by email and made sure that they received it. When it came time for the meeting all of them were connected and signed in without a problem. One person had trouble joining the phone conference and we walked them through it via a quick chat in the GoToMeeting interface. I thought it was interesting that getting everyone into the phone conference was harder than getting everyone into a GoToMeeting meeting.

It worked beautifully and saved everyone a bunch of time. We’ve decided to continue using the phone conference in conjunction with GoToMeeting so I can’t speak for the effectiveness of the VOIP features but it’s a great fit for this group.