Hosts can enable chat, Q&A, and polls before or during a webinar. These features can help encourage audience members, hosts, and panelists to interact and ask questions.

To enable these options, click "Customize" from the webinar's overview page, then click "Event room."

You can also toggle these audience interaction options from the event room settings.

The webinar chat includes several interactive options. All participants, including hosts and panelists, can:

Hosts and panelists have a few additional interactive options, including:

Hosts and panelists can also upload files, such as PDFs and MP4s, directly to the chat by clicking the "+" icon to select a file.

In a webinar chat, hosts can “silence” an attendee, which will hide the attendee’s chat messages from everyone in the event room. This includes hosts, panelists, and other attendees. However, the attendee will continue to see their own messages, without knowing they have been silenced.

To begin, click the ellipses next to the attendee’s message and select the “Silence attendee” option.

Once an attendee is “silenced”, the host will see placeholders for messages previously sent by the attendee, indicating that these messages are now hidden from the view of the host, panelist, and other attendees.

The host can undo the silence of (or unsilence) the attendee at any point by clicking “Attendee silenced” and then confirming this will make the attendee’s past and future messages visible to everyone.

The host can delete any messages and re-silence any attendee as needed.

When Q&A is enabled, audience members can enter their questions in the Q&A tab during a webinar.

From the Q&A settings, you can determine how audience members can interact with the feature.

Hosts can enable this option to restrict replies to questions to only hosts and panelists, preventing audience members from adding responses and ensuring accurate, on-topic conversations.

Hosts can grant all participants (hosts, panelists, and audiences) the option to ask questions and reply to threads anonymously. This ensures that the participant’s name and email are excluded from the question and the data export.

Hosts can enforce anonymous questions to protect attendee privacy, with names and email addresses excluded from the question and the data export. If responses from everyone are allowed, then audiences can respond anonymously as well. Host and panelist responses will always show their name and role label.

Submitted Q&A questions won’t be visible to the audience until the host approves them. If they are deleted, the audience won't be able to view them at all.

Questions that haven't been approved yet will live in the “Submitted” tab.

Click "Make public" to approve the question. It will then appear in the "Public" tab and will be visible to attendees from their Q&A panel. Or, click "Add to stage" to display the question on the stage.

Once you make a question public, a host or panelist (or attendee, depending on your settings) can create a thread to answer it. To create a new thread, click "Reply."

To delete a question, click the trash bin icon. Deleted questions appear in the “Deleted” tab and are not visible to the audience. You can move deleted questions back to the "Public" tab by clicking "Make public."

Hosts can create and edit polls from the event room at any time before or during the webinar.

In the event room, open the Polls tab. Click “Create a poll” to start drafting your question and answer options. You can also decide whether the audience can see results after voting. Once saved, you can edit, delete, or launch the draft.

You can edit polls up until they're launched. Click the pencil icon on the poll to edit it.

While a host is editing a poll, it shows "Poll is being edited..." to everyone else in the event room. Other hosts can't edit, launch, or delete that poll until the editing host saves or cancels their changes, or closes the event room.

Once launched, the poll will appear in the audience's Polls panel. You can also add the poll to the stage.

As the audience votes, hosts and panelists see the percentage of votes for each response. The event room shows results as percentages. To see each attendee's response, download the poll export after the webinar ends.

Once closed, polls will take 10 seconds to disappear from audience view.

After a webinar ends, you can download the chat, Q&A, and poll responses as CSV files. You'll find the download icons in two places:

The download will start automatically once the file is ready.

Each row is one chat message. The chat export includes:

Replies in the chat show up as their own rows. The chat export does not include email addresses.

Each row is one question. The Q&A export includes:

Each row is one attendee's response to a poll. The poll export includes: