Live Q&A and moderation
Collect questions from your audience, approve or highlight what you want shown, and display them on the projector.
For: Event directors, venue owners
With NextSet's live Q&A, your audience can submit questions from their phones during your event. You choose what the room sees — approve questions to make them visible, highlight the one you're reading out loud, or quietly hide anything off-topic. The projector updates within a few seconds of every action you take.
Before you start
Q&A is one of four live interaction types in NextSet (alongside polls, trivia, and word cloud). You create and manage all of them from the same place.
Guests need to join the event on their phone first before they can submit questions. They do that by going to your event's join link or scanning the QR code shown on the projector. Joining takes about ten seconds — they enter a display name and they're in.
Step 1 — Create a Q&A interaction
- Open your event in the director controls or venue dashboard.
- Go to the Interactions section of the panel.
- Click New interaction and choose Q&A as the type.
- Give it a title and an opening prompt — something like "Ask the panel anything."
- Choose whether to turn on upvoting — when enabled, audience members can upvote questions they want answered (they cannot upvote their own).
- Save the interaction. It sits in draft until you launch it.
Step 2 — Turn on moderation (optional but recommended)
Moderation is an event-wide setting, not per-interaction. When it is on, every Q&A (and word cloud) submission lands in a pending queue instead of appearing immediately. You review each one before the audience sees it.
To turn moderation on:
- In your event settings, open Experience or Audience settings.
- Find the Moderation toggle and switch it on.
- Save. From this point, new Q&A submissions will be pending by default.
If moderation is off, questions go straight to approved and appear on screen as soon as they are submitted.
Step 3 — Launch the Q&A
In the director console, find your Q&A interaction and click Launch. This makes it the active interaction — the projector switches to show it and guests' phones update to the question submission form.
Only one interaction can be live at a time. Launching a new one automatically closes the previous one.
Step 4 — Moderate the question queue
Once guests start submitting, you will see questions come in under the Q&A interaction in your director console. Each question shows the guest's display name and their question text.
You have four actions for each submission:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Approve | Makes the question visible on the projector |
| Highlight | Marks it as the question you are reading out — appears prominently on screen |
| Unhighlight | Removes the highlight without hiding the question |
| Hide | Removes it from the projector display (the guest cannot see it was hidden) |
Use Highlight when you are about to read a question aloud. It draws the room's attention to that question on the projector. Only one question is highlighted at a time — highlighting a new one removes the highlight from the previous one automatically.
Step 5 — Close the Q&A
When you are done taking questions, click Close on the interaction in the director console. The projector stops showing the Q&A module. You can reopen it later in the same session if needed.
What the audience sees
Guests on their phones see the question submission form while the Q&A is live. If upvoting is enabled, they also see the list of approved questions and can tap the upvote button on any question that is not their own. The upvote count updates in near-real time. Questions the director has hidden are not visible to guests.
The projector shows the approved questions, upvote counts, and the highlighted question (if any). The display refreshes automatically every few seconds — you do not need to touch anything for updates to appear.
Common problems
Questions are not appearing on the projector after guests submit them. Moderation is probably turned on, which means submissions land in the pending queue first. Open the director console, find the Q&A interaction, and approve the questions you want shown. If moderation is off and questions are still not appearing, check that the Q&A is still in the live state — it may have been closed.
A guest says they submitted a question but it is not in my queue. Their submission may have been filtered out if they submitted text that was blank or if they had not fully joined the event first. Guests must complete the join step (entering their display name) before they can submit. Ask them to re-join and try again.
Guests can't upvote a question — the button does nothing. Guests cannot upvote their own question — this is by design to keep the count fair. If the guest is trying to upvote someone else's question and nothing happens, check that upvoting was enabled when you created the Q&A. You can delete and recreate the interaction with upvoting turned on (existing questions will be lost).
I highlighted a question but nothing changed on the projector. The projector updates every few seconds. Wait a moment and it should appear. If it still does not, reload the projector page — it will pick up the current state immediately.
I want to allow guests to submit multiple questions each. By default each guest can submit one response per interaction. There is an Allow multiple submissions setting in the event's audience experience settings. Turn that on before launching the Q&A — it applies going forward and lets each guest submit as many questions as they like.