Org needs free conference calls

My boss wants me to hunt down conference calling with the following three limitations:

1. Calls must be free

2. High speed internet must not be required

3. No long distance charges

I have researched freeconference.com and freeconferencecall.com, but I do not think either service will allow us to work without high-speed internet at NO cost whatsoever. Am I right? Are there other services I have overlooked?

With out the use of the Internet to take advantage of free Voice over IP I don't think you are going to find such a service.

My suggestion would be to look at your board members and friends of the organization, and see if any of them are from a large company that may have their own conference bridge that they would be willing to donate some conference call time and access to you.

Alternatively find the donations to pay for the conference calls I've seen like 5 cents a minute per participant.

If you have a the number of phone lines coming into your organization that you need for your conference calls you could buy a phone conference bridge and host the calls your self.  You would have to get 800 inbound calling to not have any long distance visible, but some one still has to pay for the call.

There is no such thing as a free lunch

Dave

Thanks, Dave! You reinforced what I was already thinking; I am interning with the company and second opinions are paramount!

If we were to get high-speed Internet connectivity, what would the best free VOIP option be? Skype?

Skype has a limit of 5 connections for their conference call, so that may or may not fit your needs.

Ready Talk is available here on Tech Soup and offers audio and web conferencing.

If this is for internal use you may be able to use VOIP, but if you are contacting board members and donors through these conference calls you are better off with a traditional 800 number based phone call and hope for the best on web based presentations, as your audience may not be technically savvy to work around all the issues with VOIP and logging on to a web conference.

Dave

There are two very good services available that I have used.  First of all, you need to know how many users you will be having at one time.  For instance mikogo.com offers 10 free users with no audio.  However, if you use Skype, you can overcome that problem.  Mikogo is the easiest to use and the quickest to get others on .  Each software program downloads a small piece of software.  The more features offered, the more software is downloaded.  www.mikogo.com

Another one is dimdim.  You can get 20 free users and it has both voice and video conferencing built in.  The voice is done on their software so it takes a little bit to download the software.  www.dimdim.com

At Pepperdine University we used Elluminate.  They offer 3 free users and for a low price of only about $300 or so you can get up to 100 users.  Elluminate is really good for holding classes because they have some features like hand raising that make it easy to use as a coordinator.

John Oppenheim,

johnopp@speakeasy.net

Thanks, John! I haven't heard of Elluminate before. I will have to check it out.

Dave,

Thanks for all your input! I appreciate the knowledge transfer.

Melissa