Every audience-interaction feature is a promise: ask and you'll be heard, vote and you'll see the result. Break the promise — a question that vanishes, a poll that never gets read out — and the audience disengages for the rest of the show. Interaction needs its own workflow and its own staffing, like any other part of the production.
Q&A: the moderation pipeline
Questions arrive on the platform. A moderator (a named person, not "someone in the gallery") reads them as they come in, merges duplicates, flags the good ones and discards the unusable. The flagged questions go to the presenter or host on a tablet or confidence monitor, already prioritised, so they can pick the next one without reading fifty. Nothing reaches the stage unfiltered. For hybrid shows, the moderator also holds the roving mic queue in the room so in-person and online questions interleave fairly.
Make questions visible
When a question is answered, put it on screen as a graphic — name (if permitted) and question text. It tells the asker they were heard, tells everyone else the feature works, and it looks like television. Pre-build the graphic template so the moderator can populate it in seconds.
Polls and latency
Streams are delayed 5–40 seconds behind the room. If the presenter says "vote now" and closes the poll 20 seconds later, half the online audience never saw it open. Give polls a generous window (90 seconds minimum), launch them on the platform slightly before the presenter mentions them, and show results on the stream as a graphic rather than asking the presenter to read a screen the audience can't see. Our delivery guide explains the latency options.
Chat: decide what it's for
Open chat is great for community and dreadful for signal. Set expectations on screen at the top ("chat is for reactions; questions go in the Q&A tab"), have a host in the chat welcoming people and answering practical questions ("can't hear? try refreshing"), and give the moderator the power to hide messages. For large public events, pre-moderation or slow mode.
The presenter's part
Presenters must acknowledge the online audience by name and at regular intervals — "great question from Priya watching in Leeds" — or the stream becomes a window onto someone else's meeting. Brief them to leave gaps for questions and to trust the moderator's list rather than scanning a screen live.
Staffing
Under 200 attendees: one moderator can run Q&A, polls and chat. 200–1,000: a moderator plus a chat host. Over 1,000, or public: two moderators and a chat host, with the platform's automated filters on. It's a modest cost, and it's the difference between interaction that feels curated and interaction that feels like a free-for-all.
Before the show
- Pre-load polls with correct options and agreed timings in the run order.
- Seed two or three questions so the Q&A tab isn't empty when it opens.
- Agree the profanity and personal-data rules for what goes on screen.
- Rehearse the handoff from moderator to presenter.