Manage your Q&A sessions

Each participant can freely express their thoughts. You can give everybody a chance to speak up directly at the venue or remotely by launching a Question Wall.

If you’re not familiar with the Question Wall activity, you will find is description here.

1. Click on the activity in your menu and broadcast it

Once the activity is unblocked and broadcast, the participants can send their questions (or comments) at any time. They can also "like" the questions of other participants.

2. Explain the activity to your participants

Explain to the audience that they can ask their questions at any time by using the Sparkup app and ask them to participate in the activity by asking their own questions and reading the ones that have already been sent.

The participants can also "like" the questions that they think to be the most interesting. The questions that get more likes go to the top of the list and are answered first.

3. Make sure that everybody is participating

Don’t hesitate to remind the audience that they can ask their questions at any time. You can even write a question or two yourself in order to encourage interaction.

4. Use filters

You can filter the questions on your screen and on the Cast.
In the lower left corner of your screen you can use the following filters:

• Date: the last question sent will appear at the top of the list.
• Popularity: the question with more votes will appear at the top of the list.

5. Moderate the activity

Moderating the activity will allow you to hide the questions that you do not want to display on the Cast and on the participants’ devices. Learn more about moderating

If you decide to moderate the questions before publishing them, you have to be very responsive in order to keep your collaborators engaged.

6. Discuss the questions

While discussing the questions, you can choose the option Close activity. The participants will no longer be able to add new questions or propositions nor to vote.

You can then answer the questions without the list changing.

7. Cast scrolling

During the debriefing, you can highlight a question on the Cast by clicking on it. (There is no automatic scrolling on the cast, as on the facilitator part).

Did you know?

The Question Wall is an activity that is most often used in an asynchronous manner. When you unblock the activity, the participants can join and leave the activity to ask their questions whenever they want during the session.

By default, this activity is used to give the participants a chance to ask questions during a session. However, you can use the activity for other purposes as well, e.g. to gather comments, vote for an idea, etc.

Extra tips

It is important to tell your participants that you will answer all their questions or only the most popular ones in order to avoid frustration and to keep the participants engaged.

Sometimes due to restricted time you may want to skip the Q&A session. In this case, explain to your participants that their questions will be answered later on, for example, after the session.

However, we would advise you to really take the time to answer the most popular questions during your first Q&A session to encourage the participants to keep interacting with you.

Find out more about Creating a Question Wall.
Extra information:

• Q&A sessions
• Q&A with the audience
• Presentations and Q&A