Palm Beaches STC Holds First Remote Meeting Using Citrix GoToMeeting

September 20, 2007 Blog No Comments

The Palm Beaches Chapter (Florida) of the Society for Technical Communication held their local chapter meeting, Wednesday night, September 19, featuring a speaker who was located over 1000 miles away. Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler) delivered a 60-minute presentation to an audience in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida from his office in Indianapolis, Indiana. The meeting was made possible using GoToMeeting remote presentation software, a web-based application that allows presenters to share their PC screens with others over the internet. The service also offers a conference call capability, which allows the speaker to dial in via telephone to deliver the audio portion of the presentation.

The success of the remote meeting is good news for organizations like STC, whose chapters have limited budgets. Normally, chapters reimburse speakers for travel costs and overnight accommodations when they travel from afar to present at chapter events. Hosting remote presentations is one way to cut down on some of those costs. Remote meeting software—for the most part—is not free. But, it is inexpensive. The annual subscription price of GoToMeeting is likely to be far less than a chapter spends on speaker travel reimbursement annually.

And, once the chapter owns a subscription, the software allows members to hold meetings anytime. For chapters with meeting attendance issues, remote meeting software provides additional opportunities to provide member value. Instead of holding one evening meeting a month, chapters can hold several at different times and on different days. And, the same software can be used by the chapter leaders to help make board and other business meetings much easier on members. The possibilities are endless.

Remote meetings are also good news for speakers, many of which cannot squeeze long distance travel into their schedules as easily as they would like. Therefore, they must limit the number of speaking engagements they accept. Remote meeting software makes it possible for speakers to more easily participate in more meetings with less travel. This saves speakers time and money and allows them to reach out to audiences they might not otherwise get in front of.

If you have yet to test drive remote presentation software, give GoToMeeting a try! (free 30 day trial)