Run a Q&A session

  • 24 August 2020
  • 18 replies
  • 12820 views

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Using the Questions feature, attendees can use their devices or computers to send their questions to Slido and easily upvote the best ones. It's a simple way to crowdsource the most popular topics at meetings or events and see what people are genuinely interested in the most.

 

Your participants can ask an unlimited number of questions. 

 

Participants can do this anonymously, but you do have the option to set up the event to require names. More information about this is in our Participant Privacy page in community.

In this article:

 

In order to start crowdsourcing questions, you need to create a Slido event first. 


 

Ask your audience to join your event


Once you created an event, ask your audience to join it. The most common way to do this is to go to slido.com and enter the #eventcode of your event. Make sure the event dates you set up match the actual date as your participants can only use the event code during those dates. Alternatively, you can share the event link with them. 

 

Following the event link, your participants can ask questions right away and they’re not limited by any timeframe. 


 

Have the audience submit questions


Once your audience have joined the event, they can start submitting their questions. They can submit questions anonymously or with their name and they can upvote questions submitted by others.

 

Questions are sorted by their popularity, so the most popular ones appear on top. To modify the default settings, follow the Change the order of audience Q&A article


 

Manage audience questions


There are three main things you can do with questions as an admin:

  1. Highlight the question that’s being answered so that it gets more attention both on the Present and Participant modes
     
  2. Mark the question as answered once you don’t want to display it anymore. You can then view those questions in the Archive folder
     
  3. Change the order of questions and filter for starred questions

With some of our paid plans, you can also moderate questions, i.e. review them before they go live.

 


Topics for Q&A

 

Our topics feature allows your participants to navigate and filter questions in a more structured way during a Q&A session. Topics are visible in participant mode only and they’re automatically generated if and when the below criteria are met:

  • A topic must first be identified by the system using common words or phrases within at least 3 questions, and then
  • There must be at least 20 questions, or…
  • At least 3 topics generated, regardless of the number of questions

 

Here’s what it looks like for participants:

 

Q&A Topics in Participant mode

 

 

A few things to keep in mind for Q&A topics:

  • Topics are generated using only live questions – archived questions won’t be included
  • Questions need to be in English
  • Slido generates Q&A Topics using its own machine learning model. During this process, the data does not leave our infrastructure and is not exposed to any third parties.

 

 

Curious about more?

 

 


18 replies

Hello - We’d like to run an asynchronous Q&A where participants can leave questions anytime and we’ll answer within 24-48 hours. Assuming participants will not keep the Slido event open/active, can Slido push an email notification to a participant when their question has been answered?

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Hey @asmirand,

No, at the moment, there is no way to set up an email notification for participants when their question has been answered.

Instead, you could set up the event to require participants’ emails. After 48h or when you’ve answered all questions, you could export the list of participants and send them an email asking them to check the event.

Hope this helps! 🙂 I will pass on your idea as feedback.

How long can the Q&A active? 

I need the Q&A active for exchange questions for 12-months. Is it possible?

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Hi @ewintan

It is! If you go for one of the annual plans, your events (including the Q&A) can be active to up to 12months. 

For the one time plans, the maximum length is 7 days. 

 

 

Hi 

I’ve set up a Q&A event which will happen every 2 months. Is it possible to temporarily stop receiving questions e.g. for a day and then restart again, without changing the link? Thanks!

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Hi @hrops

You can, depending on your Slido plan, this is available in our professional plans and higher. You can then close questions by toggling on. 

 


However, if this isn’t the case, a workaround would be to create a permanent link for your event and moderate your questions. 

Hope this helps! Feel free to get in touch with our customer care team through your slido admin or at support@slido.com if you need us to look at your use case a little more closely, we’d be happy to assist! 

Hi! Is it possible to add more characters to the default 300 when editing questions? My task is to translate questions in Slido, so when participants have already used 250 characters, there is not enough room to add my translation. (Since questions are being ranked, it’s not possible to send the translation in a separate field.)  Thank you!

 

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Hi @Terp


300 is our maximum limit for questions so you wouldn’t be able to edit them this way. A workaround which will enable you to translate would be to reply to the question with the translation. This would then ensure that the translation was linked to the question asked. 

Hope this helps!
Best,

Can moderators see the names of people who upvote in Q&A?

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Hey @BB Admin,

No, moderators can only see the number of upvotes a question receives.

Could you maybe share your use case? Why would you like moderators to see this?

For questions, is there beside the upvote option, also in downvote (=dislike) option?

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Hi @Dieter Kaiser

There is! You can enable downvotes in your Q&A session so the preferences from your participants are more clear to you 🙂
 


Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions!

Hi there - do you set each Q&A up as a separate event? Or something within the main event?

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Hey @TaylorHopkinson ,

Each Event has its own Q&A session.

If you explain your use case a bit or how you’re planning on running your event so we can better understand what you’re asking?

Best,

Can a presenter in Powerpoint mark a question as answered, or does that need to happen on the Slido admin side?

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Hey @Rueben ,

First you will need to add the Audience Q&A Slido interaction to your Powerpoint deck.

When in Present mode, from the top right corner of the Question you want to mark answered you will see 2 options, 1 to highlight the question you are focusing on, and another to mark it as completed once you’re done. 

Let us know if you have any other questions!

Best,

Hi there - I would like to host an anonymous Q&A for participants, however I would like to have 4 different people answering the questions with their names shown.  How can I do this?

 

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Hey @Amy Moore ,

This is possible, you’ll just need to invite those 4 people as Guest Collaborators to the Event, they can then reply as the Moderator to the questions being submitted.

Let us know if you have any other questions!

Best,

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