Charge for a Zoom Meeting

[Carowine]

I'm trying to host a 3 hour workshop where people pay for it within Zoom but have the ability for all students to see each other.  I'm just not sure I can do this all within Zoom. So I'm looking to do one of two things: Either charge a fee for my workshop via Zoom Meetings OR have the ability to see everyone in the Zoom Webinars where I can charge a fee. How can I do either of these?

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, @Carowine,

A couple of questions:

•  Are you planning to meet with many people at once, or just one client at a time?
•  Will you be meeting multiple times with the same client, or only once?

I don’t think Zoom will do this for you by itself. Charging within Zoom for Zoom events is only  available in Zoom Events and Zoom OnEvents, neither of which are probably appropriate for you. 

Depending on your specific needs, I’d likely recommend either Eventbrite (for multiple clients in one meeting) or Calendly (for single clients and multiple-session meetings). I use both in my consulting practice as a Zoom event producer. 

[Carowine]

Thanks Ray!

• Are you planning to meet with many people at once, or just one client at a time? Yes, about 17 at once. 
•  Will you be meeting multiple times with the same client, or only once? No, a one time workshop, which hopefully will lead to one-to-one sessions. 

So are you saying schedule the Zoom webinar and put that event link on Calendly or EventBrite? 

Thanks!

Carol

[Ray_Harwood]

@Carowine - Carol...

Thanks for the info.  So I'm actually recommending "one or the other", and based on the fact that you're doing one webinar with 17 or so people one time, my recommendation would be to use Eventbrite for registration and payment, and to use the feature in Eventbrite that links the Eventbrite registration into your session.

Which brings me to this point: You said you want to see everyone, and you also said you want to have a Webinar.  With Webinars, you don't get to see all the attendees, normally; a webinar is designed more for a lecture/presentation-style with one (or a maybe a few) presenters to many attendees.  So maybe you want a Meeting instead -- which is where everyone naturally sees everyone else.  There is a way in a Webinar to see everyone -- by making everyone a "panelist", which while do-able, is just a little unusual, and also doesn't really get you any better features than a Meeting.  Plus the Zoom Meeting is included in your Zoom Pro account (which I'm assuming you have), and the Webinar license is another $79/month.

And then one caveat: Eventbrite isn't a trivial platform, and if you haven't used it before, you might want to consider a simpler approach -- one that doesn't require you to come up to speed on Eventbrite first.  We can discuss what that simpler approach might be, if that's your preference.

Calendly is a great tool (I use it!) for getting more one-on-one meetings with a few clients... for example, you can have your 17 clients in your webinar, tell them all about the great service you have to offer, and then ask them to arrange a meeting with you via Calendly. But it's not really applicable to the "many people in a webinar or meeting" situation.

Hopefully that's more helpful than it is confusing.  If you'd like more in-depth help with this, let me know and I'll send you a Direct Message with my contact information, and we could have a 30-45 minute Zoom meeting to discuss some of the details.  No pressure, no charge.  I do occasionally offer to do this in situations complex like yours that aren't really of the "troubleshooting" variety.  Let me know if you'd be interested... if not, we'll continue chatting here on the Zoom Community.

[thokitts]

Carowine, this is only thing about the Zoom ecosystem I find irksome.

At some point, Zoom made a business decision to only allow Zoomies to sell 'seats' via their Webinar add-on, which of course starts at $480 per year. They could have added a way to directly monetize their Meeting side, but chose not to. And it has been this way for as long as I have used Zoom.

So here is what I do when I want to sell a workshop on Zoom, although it will require you to pay for their costly Webinar add-on...

1. First create a WEBINAR. Then read Zoom's user docs to learn how to set up an internal payment portal for the webinar. Set a fee & the limit of participants. Include your own branding as well.

2. Then post the resulting link to the webinar's registration page wherever appropriate. (I market using my newsletter and social media for the most part.)

3. People who are interested can click the link to self-register and pay using Zoom's built-in PayPal portal. (Some folks will use their PP account, some their credit card.)

4. Zoom will send out a confirmation email after the student has paid, and that email will include all the information they need and a link to the upcoming Webinar.

5. I export the Zoom registrants to a spreadsheet so I have a running head count and emails, if needed. (I don't keep any emails after the workshop is over.)

6. IMPORTANT: The night before the workshop begins, I convert the WEBINAR into a MEETING. (The link will change in Zoom but the old webinar link still directs the students to the meeting with no problem.)

7. After the conversion, the Meeting will then permit you to do what you want it to do. Everyone can see and talk to each other as if they were in the same physical room.

FWIW, I use a three camera system for my instruction, one on me, one on my mixing palette, and one on the painting I am working on. I can see my students and we can talk freely. I also record the workshop using Zoom (locally on my own laptop) so I can offer it to the students for review.

Having to convert a webinar into a meeting is a dumb kludge, necessitated by the company's decision, but I haven't found any work-around for it in the more than 5 years I have been searching.

So to do what you want to do will require you subscribe to Zoom's Webinar account, and even then you still have to use my work-around.

There are third-party apps which supposedly can do all the front-end things you mention outside of Zoom, and ultimately still direct the registrant to a specified Zoom Meeting, but most of the apps I've looked at also require a subscription so comparably the costs are close.

Zoom is fantastic in many ways, a real life-saver for distant-learners, and it is a platform almost everyone has installed, but I have been annoyed enough by Zoom's arbitrary decision to keep looking for alternatives. If I find one I'll post it here.

Best luck,

thokitts