First ever Webinar...help!

[Rinahen]

Hi all!  Our business is hosting a webinar this week and we will be using a power point presentation of slides (speaker notes below).  After introduction, we'd like to begin the power point by sharing the screen.  How do I upload the power point slides to Zoom?  What are the steps.  And do I include the panelists pictures while going through the presentation?  I think I read where Zoom doesn't have the option to upload the PP to the webinar, so how do I get it to share with our attendees!  help please.  Also, what settings do I set up .. presenter mode?  etc... thank you so much!

[joshbrage_ZE]

Hi @Rinahen Whew!

Couple of tips:
1. Practice! Be sure to jump into Practice Session of the webinar as much as you can to practice! (Video: Practice Session)

2. All content is share with our Share Screen functionality (nothing is "uploaded" to Zoom) Simply get your content ready, go to Zoom, Share Screen, Choose the appropriate window and you're off! (Video: Sharing Content)

Moving forward, here is a quick learning center course https://learning.zoom.us/learn/course/external/view/elearning/22/welcome-to-zoom-webinars

Good luck, it's gonna be great!

[Rinahen]

Hi Josh:

Ha! After rereading my post, I see why you said Whew... I was sounding pretty frantic... which I was because I had never hosted a webinar before.  It was pretty stressful.  Anyways, just a quick update.  Our webinar was yesterday and immediately after we felt pretty good about it, until we read a text from a client (attendee) who say they couldn't see any of the power point slides (0nly saw our faces).  Ugh!  When we looked over the recording, all we saw was our faces as well. (used local recording).  We thought we followed all the steps to the tee ... opened up power point were were using, started zoom, opened the webinar, shared the screen, had the notes on the screen for us to use .. everything looked the way it was supposed to.  I guess we should have had a member of our team viewing as a participant and then we would've seen the slides were not showing.  Any clue what we did wrong where the slides would not be visible to participants?  So embarrassing for us.

[joshbrage_ZE]

Oh also, here's a checklist on running webinars that might help, print it out and use it! 

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, @Rinahen.  @joshbrage_ZE  has the right idea: practice, practice, practice.

Here's a process I recommend to all my clients on how to Share Screen with PowerPoint slides:

https://meetingsandwebinars.com/userguides/how-to-screen-share/ 

Working with Zoom and PowerPoint simultaneously always has potential for complexity and problems, but this process has been very successful with all my clients that have committed to using it.

[Rinahen]

Hi Ray:

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my question about webinars.  We did host the webinar yesterday and discovered after it was over (an email from a client) that the slide show was not visible the entire webinar.  All they could see was our faces (reading the speaker notes).  We are pretty bummed about it.  We did all the steps were were told .... opened power point, started zoom, after welcome to clients, shared screen (we did Alt/F5) so we could see our speaker notes ... then proceeded through the entire slide presentation.  On our monitor, everything looked good.  Because participants were muted, we had no idea they weren't seeing the presentation.  After the meeting, we viewed our recording (recorded to our local computer) and only saw our faces... not slide presentation either.  Can you offer some possibilities of what went wrong? We are trying to understand the steps, so we can do webinars for our business.  Thank you!

[Ray_Harwood]

Hi, @Rinahen.

The first and most important recommendation:  always test/test/retest every process until you are confident that it works.

Second most important recommendation: Whenever possible, join the meeting as an attendee from another device to see what attendees see.  Create yourself another user (preferably in your same account) -- it can be a Basic (free) user, since you'll only ever use that account to Join as an attendee.  (I've got 5 total accounts; two are Licensed/paid, the other three are Basic.)

My guess is that you might not have done all of the steps for sharing your screen.  Once you have done screen sharing a lot, you'll recognize immediately whether or not you are successfully sharing - the screen of the sharer always looks a lot different during the sharing process.

Generate a new webinar for yourself, log in as a host and also as an attendee, and go through the same motions you recall doing.  See what you can on the attendee account's screen.

You'll get there!  Give it another try, and let me know if you need anything else.