Enabling Q&A in a live session

Enabling Q&A in your live session will allow your audience to connect with the speakers by asking them questions or posting comments.

To add live Q&A to your live session you will need to enable the Q&A option, as explained in the Creating and configuring live sessions article.

You also have the option here of removing moderation from your Q&A, and/or allowing the audience to post comments or questions anonymously.

Note: Q&A questions that are pushed to screen are captured as part of live stream recordings.

1. Receiving questions or comments

When Q&A is enabled, participants can post questions or comments during the live session (including during the countdown for live streams), either anonymously or not (depending on the selected option):

• When the attendee does not select the "Anonymous" box, their question will appear with their name and their initials.
• When the attendee selects the "Anonymous" box, their initials will be replaced by random characters, and each separate question that they post will use new random characters.

Participants can also add links to their questions, which when clicked by others will open in their browser.

TIP: The moderator(s) can also post questions/comments directly in the Q&A. These can be added live or collected prior to the session in order to steer the discussion. Questions added by the moderator are posted on behalf of the event (with the event icon), and go straight to the For discussion tab in the Q&A.

Starting August 15, 2023 - enable upvoting on your Q&A sessions

Starting August 15, 2023, you can enable upvoting in the Q&A functionality during your live sessions, to allow attendees to show their interest in the questions or comments that have already been submitted by other members of the audience, and indicate to the host what are the most valuable questions to address. More information

2a. Moderating questions or comments

When moderation is activated for the Q&A, posts or comments from participants are received in the Incoming tab of the Q&A section of the control center.

For incoming questions, moderators have three options:

1. Edit the incoming question, if needed.
   
   
2. Approve the question for discussion: this moves the question to the Discussion tab and makes it appear for all participants to see in the Q&A section in the app.
   OR
   Archive the question: the question will not be discussed and is moved to the Archived tab. Archived questions can later be moved to the Discussion tab if needed.

2b. Using unmoderated Q&A

If moderation has been deactivated for the Q&A in the live session options, questions will go straight to the Discussion tab in Backstage, and the Incoming tab will no longer appear:

This also means that from a participant's perspective, questions will directly appear in the Q&A list for all the audience to see.

Note: With moderation disabled, users in the app can only post up to two questions per minute.

3. Pushing questions or comments to the live stream

For the questions that are approved and moved to the Discussion tab, the moderator can then Push to screen the question. The question's status changes to ON SCREEN, and the speaker can then address the question live:

Note: Questions that are pushed to the screen will be displayed to the audience in-time with the live stream, compensating for the natural delay of the stream.

4. Moving on to the next question or comment

Once the question has been discussed live, the moderator can then click on Hide from screen. The question is no longer displayed, and its status is changed to DISCUSSED.

Alternatively, the moderator can click on Push to screen for any other approved question, in which case the new question's status will be changed to ON SCREEN, and the previously discussed question's status will change to DISCUSSED.

NEXT STEPS
Find out how to add clapping to your stream.
Find out how you can add and launch polls in your stream.
Find out how to add live interpretation to your stream.