You can increase viewer engagement during your live events by hosting Q&A sessions directly in your event. This is available alongside the live chat feature; if you embed the live chat on your website, the Q&A will be included.
Live Q&A allows you to accept questions, have viewers vote to order questions based on popularity, publish the question to the stream, and ultimately answer them.
Once you have set up your live event, you can see a Q&A tab to the left side of the page, where you can click Start Q&A to open your event up to questions. You can do this before your stream or while you're live, although note that you cannot take action on a question until your event is broadcasting.
This will notify your chat users that they can begin to submit questions through Live Chat; they can log in via Vimeo or Facebook, or join as a guest where they type in their name and agree to terms of use. Questions they ask will be posted to the Q&A window immediately upon submission. They can also click the thumbs-up icon to vote on questions they like. Viewers in both your on-site and embedded live chat can participate in live Q&A.
Under the Active tab, questions will populate, which you can sort either by Recent or Popular.
When you’d like to answer a question, hover the cursor over the question and then click Answer.
A graphic overlay will appear as a lower third with the question automatically. Note that you would be expected to address the question within the stream; there is no option to type in an answer into the Q&A module.
You can hide (and re-show) the graphic overlay by clicking Hide (Show) in the Active Questions list.
When you’ve finished answering the question, click Archive to remove the question from the list. You may also archive questions without answering them or publishing them to the stream.
If you've archived a question by mistake, you can switch over to the Archived tab, hover the cursor over the questions and click Unarchive. This will put the question back in the Active tab.
To end your Q&A session, click End Q&A below the list of questions.
Please note that ending Q&A does not end the live chat. Live chat will end as soon as the broadcast ends and will not be available afterward.
Once you end the Q&A, you can export a CSV log of the Q&A by click Export at the top of the page.
If you're streaming from a recurring event, this button opens a drop-down menu with a list of the date/times of all streams in the last 30 days that you can archive; select Current event for the active event.
The CSV includes the following information:
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Name (person who asked it / anonymous)
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The question
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Time submitted
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Number of upvotes
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Answered (yes/no)
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Archived (yes/no)
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Approved (yes/no/N/A – this only applies to Enterprise customers who have access to moderation features)
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Q&A number (if you held multiple Q&A sessions within one stream, i.e. you started a Q&A, then ended it, then started it again prior to ending your broadcast; this lets you know if the question was asked during which Q&A session during the course of the stream).