Providing question and answering (Q&A) at your virtual events and in group calls is important to engage your audience and ensure they are learning from your presenters and walking away with a valuable understanding of the programming.

Q&A can be enabled in meeting, hybrid or livestream events and in roundtables at the community or event level. It can either be set up as general Q&A where questions are visible to all attendees, or moderated Q&A where authorized users (e.g., hosts, staff, chat moderators, event collaborators, and panelists in meeting and webinar events) have to approve questions to be visible to other attendees. By default, anyone added in Event Permissions at any level are granted chat moderation controls.

Authorized users can also send a private reply to a question. In meeting and webinar events, panelists can also send private replies. Private replies are visible only to the attendee who asked the question, along with hosts, staff, moderators, and panelists.

General or moderated, enabling Q&A creates a Q&A tab in the chat box for attendees to submit questions to presenters.

All questions are visible to everyone upon submission.

If you choose to have your Q&A be moderated, each submitted question will not be visible to any attendees until it has been approved by hosts, staff, chat moderators, or event collaborators. Questions that have been submitted but not been approved will be labeled as "In Review", and will only be visible to hosts, staff, chat moderators, or event collaborators:

To approve the question, click on the check-mark button:

If enabled, Q&A will populate a second tab in the chat section of the event titled "Q&A". From that tab, attendees can ask questions that will appear in the Q&A and chat thread.

Attendees navigate to the Q&A tab, select "Ask a Question", type in their question, and hit “Ask” to have their question appear to the crowd, or to the moderator to approve.

You can also allow attendees to ask questions anonymously by toggling on the "Allow anonymous questions" setting in the dashboard. The author of an anonymous question cannot be identified even by hosts, staff, chat moderators, or event collaborators.

Authorized users such as hosts, staff, chat moderators, or event collaborators can reply directly to a question. In meeting and webinar events, panelists can also reply directly to questions. If you are using moderated Q&A, authorized users and panelists may reply to a question before and after the question is approved. It is also possible to give multiple replies to a question. To reply, click on the text of a submitted question or click the three-dot menu and select “Type reply.”

If the event has the setting Auto-mark questions as answered when replied in text enabled, posting a reply — including a reply from a panelist — will also move the question to the Answered filter.

Doing so will open the question reply view, where they can submit, edit, delete, or view replies. Panelists can delete their own replies, but cannot delete questions or other people’s replies:

Each reply can be up to 500 characters.

When typing a reply, authorized users can choose to send the answer as a private reply. In meeting and webinar events, panelists can also send private replies. A private reply is not visible to other attendees. It is visible only to the member who asked the question, along with hosts, staff, moderators, and panelists.

A private reply is only visible to:

Private and public replies can both exist on the same question. If a question has multiple replies, each reply keeps its own visibility setting.

In moderated Q&A, private replies do not change the question’s moderation state. A question will remain In Review even if it has already received a private reply.

If a question is later approved and also receives a public reply, the public reply will be visible to all attendees, while the private reply remains visible only to the question owner, hosts, staff, moderators, and panelists.

For attendees who asked the question, Gradual will show a View reply button and unread indicators when a new private reply is available.

If anonymous questions are enabled, private replies can still be viewed by the attendee who submitted the anonymous question. The identity of the anonymous question author is not revealed to hosts, staff, chat moderators, or event collaborators.

Attendees can delete their questions at any time by selecting the trash icon beside their questions. Chat moderators, hosts, or event collaborators can also delete questions and see all deleted questions. Panelists can delete their own replies, but they cannot delete questions or view deleted questions.

Attendees can select the thumbs-up icon to vote for questions they support and the platform will show chat moderators, hosts, or event collaborators the most popular questions.

Learn how to enable Q&A in your upcoming events, and how to moderate and best engage with the audience during Q&A in this resource.