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.

There are several interactive options in a webinar chat. All participants, including hosts and panelists, can:

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

Hosts and panelists can also upload files directly to the chat, such as PDFs and MP4s, 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 said attendee will continue to see their own messages, without knowing they have been silenced.

To begin, click the three dots 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 have the option to 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 that all questions are anonymous 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. Or, if they are deleted, they will not be viewable by the audience at all.

Questions that have not yet been approved 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 a question is made public, a host or panelist (or attendee, depending on your settings) can create a thread to answer the question. To create a new thread, click "Reply."

To delete a question, click the trash bin icon. Any deleted questions will appear in the “Deleted” tab and are not visible to the audience. Deleted questions can be moved back over 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.

While in the Event room, navigate to the "Polls" tab. Clicking “Create a poll” lets you start drafting your question and answer options. You can also decide whether the audience can see results after voting. Once saved, the draft can then be edited, deleted, or launched.

Once launched, the poll will become visible to the audience in their Polls panel. You can also add the poll to the stage.

As the audience votes, the host and panelists will see the percentage of votes for each response.

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