Live Q&A with your audience

Interactive questions and answers

Questions and answers sessions (Q&A) are an effective meeting format for many reasons. Listeners can ask questions or offer ideas and then vote for other submissions. The host of the presentation answers questions and manages different ideas presented throughout the session. This allows the presenter to keep the audience engaged and participating in the meeting. The Q&A session format is a well-suited option for these types of meeting:

• Press conferences
• Meetings with fans
• Brainstorming
• Lectures and seminars

The purpose of this format is to easily share opinions and information. It’s a useful tool for establishing relationships with customers, fans, employees, and the general public. However, people don’t always ask relevant questions, and even the most thoughtfully planned session can get derailed. This can happen when the audience doesn’t ask questions related to the topic at hand, or simply doesn’t relate to the speaker. That’s why it’s essential to organize the event in a way that mitigates any negativity and promotes the benefits of these presentations. And that’s where Q&A software for session automation, like Swift Polling, comes in.

How to use questions and answers

During Q&A sessions, you can compile:

• Feedback
• Listener questions
• Suggestions
• Ideas

All of this is part of the open-ended question term, and this means polls don’t have strictly defined options and formats. Participants address the organizers or the speaker in a freestyle manner, without any special rules or restrictions. Where Q&A session can be used:

• In discussions — at meetings, at public round tables, in press conferences.
• In retrospect — review and joint analysis of the company’s past reporting period
• In brainstorming — creating a list of ideas supported by the majority of participants
• In interviews — with game developers, authors, creators, etc.
• In education — workshops to increase student involvement and engagement

It’s a flexible format that is appropriate whenever you need to get feedback from your audience. The question session format helps:

• Analyze the audience: what do they care about the most?
• Answer burning questions
• Find new ideas and solutions to problems
• Understand where to go next — in business, development, teaching, etc.

How to create questions and answers with Swift Polling

If you don’t have an account, the first step is to sign up with Swift Polling. When you register, you will enter your full name, email address, and password. It only takes a few steps to create an online Q&A:

• Enter the dashboard and click on Create New Poll.
• Specify the question type: Open Ended
• Assign a phone number for SMS messages or a symbol combination to enter the online survey on the website.
• Click on “Start” at the bottom of the page

Participants will send their answers via SMS or on the website. Our Q&A software compiles responses in the Feedback section. You can share the data you collect by embedding the poll in a PowerPoint slide or by enabling Presentation Mode. Responses can be displayed in three ways:

• Wall display — each answer is in a box
• Single display — messages are shown one after another
• Word clouds — received responses are collected in a single cloud. Repeated words become larger than less popular words.

We also provide an archiving function. With this feature, questions marked with an asterisk aren’t shown on the screen. This is useful when the audience has already discussed a particular response and you no longer need to display it on the screen.

Give your audience a chance to speak out

Interactive questions are an effective way to help your audience speak out and be heard. With this kind of session, your listeners are able to express themselves in many ways:

• Share their opinion
• Brainstorm
• Upvote the options shared by other participants
• Downvote options that are considered inappropriate or ineffective

Session participants can send responses during your event. Suggestions, questions, and ideas appear immediately on the screen in real-time. Our system collects all answers at once and compiles them on a single dashboard. Make your event multi-channel:

• With our live Q&A platform, you can create polls on Facebook. These responses are aggregated with the rest of your responses.
• Create a hashtag Twitter poll
• Facebook and Twitter data is connected directly to your account dashboard.

Anonymous questions = equal opportunities

Participants can ask questions online anonymously during a web version of a Q&A session. This anonymity can be beneficial as it encourages participants to ask frank and honest questions and offer suggestions at the same time. Even those who are reluctant to share can express their opinion with the comfort of knowing their identity is protected. This also means the most vocal participants aren’t overwhelming anyone else and everyone has the same opportunity to interact in the session. Note that anonymity is not available for SMS responses in the open-ended questions format that is used for Q&As. It’s worth remembering that with the introduction of anonymity, not all participants will refrain from irrelevant, hostile, or obscene comments. To help keep these at bay, our platform offers filtering options. You can filter questions before going live in a couple of clicks:

• Go to the settings for the current Q & A session
• Select the 'Which to show — Curated' settings
• The audience will only see the questions you have marked with a star

If you don’t want to limit session transparency, then use social downvoting. Participants can remove inappropriate or undesirable responses collectively.

Identify the most important questions

Our online Q&A platform allows you to identify the most critical questions in real-time. With the crowdsource upvoting function, session participants will vote for the topics they are most interested in. All attendees have equal opportunities to express themselves and vote. With upvoting, the audience collectively prioritizes talking points. This is useful when you need to:

• Find important areas for further business development
• Identify “gaps” and essential points of project development
• Answer “burning” questions from fans
• Identify the most critical social issues
• Explore your audience with Q&A analytics

Our platform offers convenient visual Q&A analytics. Every single poll, including Q&A sessions, provides you with this data:

• The breakdown of votes per option
• The breakdown of response per channel (SMS, web)
• The date and time of the Q&A creation

You’ll see which questions are the most popular and get the biggest response from the audience. Choose these visual graphics formats to display the results:

• Select the pie chart to display the percentages
• Or select the column chart to represent absolute values (in numbers)

You are also able to upload the results to a CSV file. You can choose to convert it into Excel if you prefer to use this program for analysis.