Live Q&A Tool to Empower Your Presentation
Open up the floor to instant, orderly questions.
Never wait in awkward silence again! Check out AhaSlides Live Q&A
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Live Q&A Tips with AhaSlides
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- Host successfully an Q&A session
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- Fun Questions to Ask Students
- General Interesting Questions to Ask
How Does a Live Q&A Work?
Very simply, actually!
With AhaSlides you can create a Q&A slide with a single click. Your audience join your Q&A on their phones and type in their burning questions, all of which show up on your device for you to address one-by-one.
Best of all, you can embed your Q&A directly within your presentation. Your audience can send you questions throughout and you can answer them whenever the time is right!
Make your Live Q&A for Free!
01
Create your Q&A Slide
Sign up for free, and with a new presentation, select a Q&A slide then hit 'Present'.
02
Invite your Audience
Click the top bar to reveal your unique join code and QR code for your audience. They enter or scan the code with their phones and can start submitting their questions.
03
Answer Away!
See all questions arranged by time or most upvoted. Address them one-by-one, mark them as answered and pin the most pertinent.
The Complete Q&A Package
Check out the 6 top features of AhaSlides' live Q&A tool. Any questions?
Ask Anywhere
To ask a question, your audience need nothing but what's in their pockets.
Moderation Mode
Send someone 'backstage' to approve or deny questions before they show.
Allow Anonymity
Get more questions by allowing participants to submit anonymously.
Customise
Add backgrounds, fonts and audio to play while everyone's thinking!
Profanity Filter
Automatically block out those words you don't want there!
Take it home
Export all the questions you get from your presentation to Excel.
💡 Want to compare? Check out the top 5 free Q&A platforms around right now!
Uses for a Live Q&A
Broadly speaking, a live Q&A is part of a larger picture. That picture can be a meeting, a webinar, a lesson, or any event in which you want to give information and clear up any misunderstandings through question and answer…
At Work...
Team Meetings
You're really not the only one to have felt lost in a team meeting. With plans being made and remade, while stats, quotes, and graph upon graph are pulled up in between, it's hard to keep everyone on the same page. A live question and answer after each important point can really help all team members stay afloat.
Townhall Meeting
Naturally, when you gather a whole company together for a townhall meeting (or all-hands meeting), there should be plenty of questions coming your way. Any company with more than a handful of employees may struggle to keep on top of this, but a live Q&A tool can keep things beautifully ordered.
For Education...
Teaching
There are lots of ways to test understanding of a topic. Tests, assignments and extended projects are all great in the long-run, but for a quick way to dispel any minconceptions before students leave the class, a 5-minute Q&A at the end of each lesson can make a world of difference.
Training and Development
It's no secret why the sound advice of most training sessions falls on deaf ears. If an audience are going to be in their chairs for hours on end, they're going to need some interaction. A Q&A gives them that, as well as the chance to ask questions to the trainer that haven't been covered so far.
Online...
Ask me Anything (AMA)
Vloggers, celebrities, company CEOs; you can find some really interesting people on Reddit inviting readers to ask them anything. It's a format that's taken off across not just social media, but in vlogs, podcasts, and even amongst best friends. An online Q&A platform can set a solid AMA from a sloppy one.
Virtual Events
It's a remote world nowadays. We've got a new, digital way to work, learn, hangout and gather together in spaces. No matter where your event is happening, get an online Q&A tool that lets anyone submit a question at any time from wherever they are in the world.
Answer Everyone.
Don’t miss a beat, or a question, with AhaSlides’ free live Q&A tool. Set up in seconds!
Benefits of a Live Q&A
- Keep it Engaging – A live Q&A session is just one way in which you can make your presentation interactive. Interactivity, the stats say, make your presentation more engaging and more memorable.
- Total Clarity – It goes without saying that you want your presentation to be as understandable as possible. For any of the parts that your audience didn’t get, they know they have the safety net of a Q&A to get full clarity on your points.
- Be 100% Open – For those doing a townhall meeting or an ask me anything, a Q&A offers the chance to humanise yourself and your message. It shows you are open to questions you haven’t prepared for.
- More Digestible – You may be surprised at how much clearer your message is when it’s delivered in the bite-sized format of a Q&A. Not everyone likes slides and visuals, some people just love to listen.
- Highly Relatable – These are the questions that your audience want answered. If you want to leave them satisfied, there’s no better way than answering questions put forward by the crowd.
These days we are all doing more online and I've found AhaSlides to be especially helpful with making workshops engaging and interactive.
3 Key Tips to Hosting A Successful Q&A Online in 2022
No matter how clearly you can explain your ideas, there’s always at least one question in the crowd. Here are some quick tips to deal with Q&A queries properly…
Make it Anonymous
People are often afraid to speak up, so allow them to submit anonymously. You'll get heaps of questions!
Give Plenty of Time
Marketing guru Guy Kawasaki believes that in an hour-long presentation your Q&A should take up 40 minutes.
Prepare Some Questions
Get the ball rolling with some pre-approved questions. Don't just choose ones that make you look good!
Collect Throughout
Don't let your audience forget a question. Q&A tools let them submit whenever they have something to ask.
Get Moderated
Keep troubling questions at bay with a moderator, who approves and denies questions before you see them.
Have a good Heading
The right heading to your Q&A gets everyone thinking and talking. Try out something a little unexpected.
By the end of this article, you’ll be able to make use of these 3 facets of an online Q&A session:
If you’re about to give a presentation nowadays, chances are that you’ll be hosting it and your Q&A online.
As good as a virtual Q&A can be for clearing up a topic or even as an online icebreaker, any Q&A session has the potential for piercing silence and your audience’s awkward glances at their shoes.
Online Q&As are quite different from in-person ones, so it’s hard to know how to prepare for them and execute them. Well, AhaSlides has hosted many a live Q&A online through our interactive presentation software.
Following the 3 key tips below is your ticket to hosting a perfectly balanced, perfectly engaged Q&A session.
Tip #1: Prepare for It!
Always a bountiful source of whimsical quotes, Abraham Lincoln once said “give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first 4 sharpening the axe“.
You may not be felling any trees by hosting a Q&A online, but you’ll certainly be trying to topple the barriers between you and your audience. And, to do this, you’ll need to prepare.
Now, you’ll obviously never be able to predict exactly what your audience is going to ask, but you can get a pretty good idea by finding out what they want to take away from your Q&A session. A great way to do this is by using interactive software like AhaSlides.
A word cloud, like the image above, can give you a much better understanding of the topics that your audience wants to discuss in the Q&A. It asks your audience what they’d like to talk about and then lays out all of their answers in one grid. The ones with identical wording appear large and at the centre, revealing which topics are the most popular.
Doing this before the Q&A begins gives you time to prepare for the questions that your audience most want answered later.
Click here for more advice on how to set up the perfect word cloud.
Tip #2 – Order and Display it Professionally
Putting some time into the display and organisation of your Q&A online gives the audience a chance to see what’s been asked and what’s been answered.
Again, it’s easy to do this using AhaSlides. There’s a dedicated Q&A slide (like in the image above) that gives you full moderating power over your audience’s questions.
Here are a few of the ways that a Q&A slide keeps everything neat, tidy and most importantly, engaging:
- Display and sorting – A Q&A slide is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. All the audience’s questions are displayed for everyone to see and are automatically sorted into categories.
- Pinning queries – Maybe you’re running out of time on your Q&A but the answers still keep flooding in. Pinning any of the questions is a great way to ensure none get lost in the mix.
- Audience upvoting – This feature lets the audience ‘thumbs up’ any of the queries that they, too, would like an answer to. The more popular a query, the higher it is placed on the ‘top questions’ table.
- Anonymity – Much of your audience will be embarassed to ask questions – that’s just the reality of Q&A. Allowing your participants to ask anonymously is so important to addressing questions that may never come to light in an in-person setting.
Remember: hosting a Q&A online means that your questions can come in at any time.
This means that if you’re holding a presentation, your audience can ask you questions throughout. This keeps the flow of the presentation alive and allows audience members to submit questions as soon as they pop into their heads.
Dedicate at least 1/5th of your allotted time to the Q&A (Guy Kawasaki actually recommends 2/3rds!) Or, spend a few minutes after each section engaging with the audience via a brief Q&A that ensures they’re all keeping up.
What if you’re not hosting your Q&A online? What if it’s an in-person event? Well, you can still make use of online features for better display and organisation.
Allow your audience to submit questions to an online Q&A canvas. Having these on the same screen means you can address each of them individually and methodically.
Want to get right to it? Find out how to set up a Q&A slide with AhaSlides here.
Tip #3 – Share it Online!
If you’re restricted by time or simply want to leave your Q&A answers out there for your audience to come back to at any time, you have the option with AhaSlides to share your presentation and your Q&A online.
The trick to doing this is to use your computer to record your audio answers of questions that pop up in your Q&A. After that, use AhaSlides to make a slide for each answer, with the question as the title and your embedded audio response.
This way, you can manage the questions and remove the duplicates. Your audience will also have an organised overview of what’s been fielded throughout the session and will have a reliable source for reference after it’s done.
Takeaway
Want to Start Hosting a Successful Live Q&A? Try AhaSlides for free today!
AhaSlides is a powerful and fiercely interactive piece of software for the global audience. Live Q&A s are ramping up in popularity and AhaSlides can help you stay ahead of the curve.
Join hundreds of thousands of happy users by clicking on the button below!
