Live Q&A and polls, with a moderator in front of them
Live Q&A in event67 lets attendees ask a question from the session screen and upvote the questions other people asked, so what reaches the stage is what the room actually wants answered. Polls run in the same place, and both pass through a moderator queue in the console before anything is shown.
What this looks like in the product
The queue is a console page, so a moderator works it on a laptop at the side of the room.
- Upvoted Q&A
- Attendees ask from the session screen and upvote each other, so the order is the room's rather than the loudest person's.
- Moderator queue
- A console page where questions are approved, held or dismissed before they reach the stage screen.
- Live polls
- Polls answered in real time from the session an attendee is already in, with results as they land.
- Crowd reactions
- Reactions stream across the room during a keynote, with no leaderboard and no points attached.
- Archived results
- Every question and poll result is kept in the end-of-event report.
The moderator queue
- Incoming, newest first
- Sorted by upvotes
- Approve to the stage screen
- Hold for the speaker to see later
- Dismissed, and hidden from the room
Moderation is the feature, the queue is the interface
Open microphones fail in a predictable way. One person makes a speech instead of asking a question, a second asks something only relevant to their own company, and the twelve people with a good question never get to the front of the line. The room notices, and afterwards the feedback says the Q&A was a waste of time.
Upvoting fixes the ordering problem and creates a second one: whatever is funny rises, and whatever is hostile rises faster. So the sort order cannot be the only control. A person has to be able to look at the queue before the room does.
In event67 the two work together. Attendees ask and upvote, which produces a ranked list. A moderator sits in the console with that list and decides what goes to the stage screen, what gets held for the speaker to answer later, and what quietly does not appear. Nothing reaches the screen that a human has not seen.
- questions reach the stage screen without a moderator approving them
- 0questions reach the stage screen without a moderator approving them
- points, badges or leaderboards anywhere in the product
- 0points, badges or leaderboards anywhere in the product
- places a question can go instead of the screen: held for the speaker, or dismissed
- 2places a question can go instead of the screen: held for the speaker, or dismissed
How a question travels
An attendee asks from the session
The question box is on the session detail screen, so nobody navigates anywhere to ask. Questions are attributed, which is itself a moderating force.
The room votes
Other attendees upvote. The list re-sorts live, and the same question asked twice tends to consolidate because people vote rather than repeat.
A moderator triages
In the console, questions are approved, held or dismissed. Approvals are what appear on the stage screen; a dismissed question stays visible to the moderator rather than vanishing from the queue.
The speaker answers what the room chose
The screen shows the approved queue in vote order, so the person on stage is reading the room's priorities rather than guessing them.
Polls, and what they are good for
A poll is answered from the same session screen and the results come back as they land. Used well, it is the fastest way to make three hundred people participate in something without a microphone, and it gives a speaker a real number to react to instead of a show of hands they cannot count.
The honest limits are worth knowing before you plan a session around it. Polls are for the room, not for research: there is no branching, no quotas, no weighting and no export to a statistics package. And the results are attributable to the attendee in the console, which means a poll is not the right instrument for a genuinely sensitive internal question.
- Where polls work
- Warming a room, breaking a keynote into two halves, and settling an argument between two panellists with actual numbers.
- Where they do not
- Anonymous internal sentiment, anything that needs branching, and anything you intend to quote as research.
- Reactions
- A separate, lighter thing: reactions stream across the room during a keynote. There is deliberately no score, no leaderboard and no badge, because gamification is not in this product.
What this will not do
- No anonymous questions. Questions carry the asker's name, which is a moderation choice rather than an oversight.
- No streaming. event67 does not carry video, so the stage screen is something you put on a display in the room, not a broadcast.
- No simultaneous translation or live captioning of questions.
- No branching polls, quotas, weighting or statistical export.
- No gamification: no points, no leaderboards, no challenges, anywhere in the product.
Where this earns a place in the run of show
Large plenaries where the microphone queue is the problem. All-hands meetings where leadership genuinely wants the uncomfortable question and needs it surfaced by votes rather than by courage. Panel sessions, where a poll is the only way to make an hour of talking heads interactive.
It is worth less in a twenty-person workshop, where the room can simply speak, and adding a queue between people who can see each other makes the session worse rather than better.
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What it costs
- Free up to 50
- activated attendees, on one live event
- $5
- per activated attendee beyond 50
- $4,750
- the most one event can ever cost, whatever happens past 1,000
Activated means the person claimed their invite and opened the app. Not when you import them, not when the invite is delivered, and not if they register and stay home.
Questions people actually ask
Can attendees ask questions anonymously?
No. A question carries the name of the person who asked it. That is a deliberate choice: attribution is the cheapest moderation there is, and the moderator queue exists to handle the questions that attribution does not deter. If your event genuinely needs anonymous questions, this is the wrong tool for that session.
What stops a hostile question reaching the screen?
A moderator does. Nothing appears on the stage screen without being approved in the console first, regardless of how many upvotes it has. A dismissed question stays in the moderator's queue rather than disappearing, so the decision is visible to the team at the time. It does not record which moderator made the call, so it is not reviewable after the fact.
Do polls work if attendees are on the browser event site rather than the app?
The live features are where the app earns its place. Plan on the app for Q&A and polls, and treat the browser event site as the schedule, speakers and forms for people who did not install anything.
How many people can be in a Q&A at once?
The constraint you will meet first is the room's connectivity, not the software. Six hundred people all voting in the same ninety seconds is a wifi question before it is an application question, and it is worth asking the venue about the access-point count in the main hall.
Does Q&A cost extra?
No. Q&A, polls and reactions are part of every event including the free tier. The meter counts activated attendees: 50 free, $5 each after that, and one event never exceeds $4,750.
Keep reading
Features in the same session
Event types that lean on this
See it in your own event
Your first 50 attendees are free on every event, so the smallest version of this costs nothing to try.