Managing attendees and panelists in a webinar


You can have both panelists and attendees in your webinar and manage them as host during the session. By clicking Participants in your host controls, you can manage the panelists and attendees in your webinar. This includes promoting a panelist to co-host or attendee to panelist, demoting panelists to attendee, unmuting, stopping video, and more.

You can view reporting after your webinar concludes, to see registration, attendee, polling, and other details. 

For managing panelists before the webinar session, you have the option to manually add or remove them as a host.

This article covers:

Prerequisites managing attendees and panelists in a webinar

How to access the Participants panel

  1. Sign in to the Zoom desktop client.
  2. Start a webinar as the host.
  3. Click on Participants in the webinar controls.
    The Participants panel will be on right side of your screen. The host, co-hosts, and panelists will be listed in the Panelist tab and the attendees will be listed the Attendees tab.

Note: Participants are displayed in the following order.

  1. Participants allowed to talk.
  2. Participants with their hand raised. Participants that raised their hand first are displayed at the top.
  3. Participants without their hand raised.

How to manage panelists

Hover over over the panelist's name and click More. You will see the following options to manage participants:

Changing a panelist to attendee

If you demote a panelist, it will remove their panelist join link from the web. If it is a recurring webinar, this also means that it will remove the panelist from all occurrences. If you promote them back to a panelist within the same webinar that they were demoted, then they are added back on the web.

  1. Sign in to the Zoom desktop client.
  2. Start a webinar as the host.
  3. Click Participants .
  4. Click the Panelists tab.
  5. Hover over the name of the panelist you want to make an attendee and click on More.
  6. Click Change Role to Attendee.

How to manage attendees

On the Attendees tab, you will see the list of present attendees with any non-verbal feedback they have selected next to their name. When there are 7 or more attendees, the search bar will be available at the top of the list, allowing you to quickly search for a specific attendee. 

To manage attendees, hover over the attendee's name and click More. You will see the following options:

Promoting an attendee to panelist

  1. Sign in to the Zoom desktop client.
  2. Start a webinar as the host.
  3. Click Participants .
  4. Click the Attendees tab.
  5. Hover over the name of the attendee you want to promote and click More.
  6. Click Promote to panelist.

Additional controls

There are some additional controls at the bottom of the Participants panel in the Panelists tab: