Ask Me Anything best practices and tips

I am running my first one at the end of the month, but it's not like a virtual event, but just 5 days in the Community (as it's summer holiday in the Netherlands and not everyone being available) through a post that will open up on Monday and I will close it again Friday end of the day. And I have several experts available on this specific topic throughout the week to answer the questions that are asked… 

This is just a first experiment and we will see from there how we will continue with this… 
Mine are topic specific …. 

Love that idea ​@Sanne van Opstal-Brakel 🔥

tbh, they ask the spicy question sometimes they can get a spicy answer. Have to be honest with those Qs that can be on the hotter side or spicier side. If you sugar coat it, it can come back with extra cajun. 

Dont be afraid to be honest.

Can also do live Q&A and do all typed questions as a response in a later post. You will have more time for any of those spicier Qs to formulate a response.

Just noticing this post, so I hope my response is still helpful. We do a lot of AMAs, and here are some of our best practices.

• We use Zoom, which allows us to use the included Q&A feature. This feature lets us do a few things:
  • Aggregate all questions in one place (no need to scroll through the chat or try to keep track of it there). Zoom also provides a report afterward of all questions.
  • Accept anonymous questions (some people otherwise feel shy)
  • Only show answered questions (we can easily ignore questions that are too spicy or off-topic, because only we can see them)
  • Type answers to questions or respond live: we often have 1-2 supporting team members “backstage” who type answers to questions as they come in. This is helpful if there’s presented content in addition to Q&A; attendees can get answers while the presentation is still happening. Also useful if we get more questions than we can handle live (which happens). 
  • Voting: if you choose to allow all questions to be visible, attendees can upvote questions, allowing you to focus on answering the most important ones.
• We also set up the event as a Webinar in Zoom rather than a Meeting; we don’t give attendees mic or camera access. Less to moderate and less risk, plus a cleaner event experience for attendees. Plus, it further helps funnel all questions into the Q&A space.
• Post the recording in the Community, if possible.
• We also summarize the Q&A into an FAQ-style format that we post with the recording. This helps those watching on-demand in the future and creates searchable content.
  • Automate it, if possible: We use the Q&A report from Zoom, feed it and the event transcript into an AI agent, and produce a consolidated Q&A summary that is 90% workable before human review. Huge time savings!
• Agree with ​@mitchell.gordon: be honest. If you can’t answer something, just say so (not enough information, need to follow up later, we can’t commit to that, or whatever the reason is). Being real like that builds huge trust with your Community; they discover you can handle their challenging topics and they can trust you.
• Keep the vibe casual. If it feels too produced or stiff, people won't feel as comfortable asking questions. Casual feels like an engaging conversation; overly produced feels like a webinar they can monitor (and half ignore) while doing other things.

Those are just some things we’ve learned along the way that work for us. Hope some of it is helpful for you too!