In episode 4/ 8 of our deep dive series on the robust features of town hall in Microsoft Teams, we show you how to set up the Q&A widget prior to your event go-live, including:
- Learn all of the Q&A settings
- Create and manage discussion threads
- Activate replies
- Moderate questions and avoid GOTCHAS
Video Transcript
Well hello, welcome back to our ongoing series on getting your virtual event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. We’re getting close to our event. We’ve learned what’s new in Town Hall, we’ve set up our event in Teams, and we’ve sent a branded invite to our presenters and attendees. Before we go live, let’s take a look at how our attendees are going to engage with the event using the new and improved Q&A widget.
Q&A Widget Settings
From the Teams calendar, we’re going to select our Town Hall event. We have a nice branded look, check out our last video. Up at the top, we’re going to go to Q&A, and you’ll find some Q&A settings. So let’s go through these real fast.
Questions: We have this enabled. Attendees can ask questions, they’ll have a little chat box, they can ask “what’s your favorite color?” If you turn questions off, attendees cannot post anything on their own, but you as a moderator can post discussion threads, and people can react and respond to that.
Replies: If an attendee asks “what’s your favorite color,” and you have replies turned on, a different attendee can reply to that and say “blue.” This creates sort of conversation threads.
Anonymous posts: If this is turned on, attendees can select a little checkbox when they ask a question, and their question will be anonymous. However, replies and reactions will not be anonymous. It is only asking a question that will be anonymous.
And finally, moderate questions. In Teams Live Events, the Q&A widget was moderated, you couldn’t turn it off. Now in Town Hall, you can keep it off, or you can turn it on. Keeping moderate questions off means your Q&A will be wide open for attendees. Once anyone asks a question, all attendees will be able to see it. Turning moderate questions on will make it so that a moderator has to approve questions before they are pushed out to the audience. Here you’ll see the option to publish, which pushes it out to everyone, or dismiss, which clears the question entirely and no one will know the difference. Once a question is published, people can react and comment on it, just like we’ve been looking at. This may feel a little bit more familiar if you’ve been using Teams Live Events.
Two big gotchas with moderate questions I want to get into very quickly. One is written in red right underneath it, which is that once you turn on moderate questions and hit save, you cannot turn it off. I don’t know why. Similarly, if you turn it on and hit save, you can’t then add co-organizers to act as moderators. I do not know why that’s the case. I’m sure it’s not supposed to be, and I hope it gets fixed soon, but I have run into this issue, and I don’t want anyone else to as well. So I do recommend just leaving it off until you’re very buttoned up, and then you can turn it on later. That said, for our event, I want questions and replies, I’ll allow anonymous posts, and we can go ahead and hit save.
Wrap-Up
And that’s about it. So our pre-show setup within Teams is more or less done. All that’s left is sort of everything else. We got to get our decks ready, we got to make sure our videos are ready to go. So in our next video, we’re going to take a look at the best practices of sharing out decks and videos within Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. Until then, what do you think about the new Q&A widget? Are there any features that you’d like to see moving forward? Let us know in the comments, along with any other questions or thoughts that you have about Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. For Worktank, my name is Sean, thanks so much for watching.
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