Ask Me Anything events in Viva Engage

Create an AMA event

When you create an AMA event, you accept the role of the host or organizer. Hosts and organizers can edit and delete the event and moderate attendee participation.

1. Select the plus (+) button next to Create new AMA on the right side of your storyline or the leader's storyline where the AMA event will be held.

2. In the Create AMA event form, specify the event name, start and end dates, start and end times, and description.
   

3. For Visibility, choose to invite everyone or to invite specific people and groups. 
   
   General makes the event available to everyone in the organization. The AMA gets promoted to your followers and audience, but not to everyone. ​​​​​​

   Private lets you restrict the AMA event only to persons and groups that you select in the Attendees field. 
   
   

   Important: ​​​​​​​To add a Microsoft 365 group or security group to the Attendee field, you must have admin permissions for that group. ​​​​​​​To add a Microsoft Teams connected group to the Attendees field, you must be the Teams group admin. 

4. Specify hosts and organizers from people in your organization. They'll be notified of their role and have the option to decline.

   1. ​​​​​​​Hosts are the face of the event and appear in the event description.

   2. Organizers help moderate questions or support the hosts and manage event activity in the background.

5. Specify how to handle audience participation.

   1. Moderate questions allows hosts and organizers to screen questions before they're officially published. Once you enable this setting, it's on for the duration of the event and can't be turned off.

   2. Attendee permissions gives attendees varying degrees of participation and anonymity:​​​​​

      • You can allow attendees to submit anonymous posts and comments by enabling the anonymous posts and anonymous comments toggle.

        An anonymous post or comment isn't associated with the attendee and can't be tracked by the organization, including for compliance. Moderators can turn off the feature at any time. After doing so, previous anonymous questions and comments remain anonymous.

        Comments and reactions to anonymous questions aren't anonymous. Reactions to anonymous comments also aren’t anonymous. We recommend disabling reactions to preserve anonymity.

        Note: If you enable moderation, you can moderate anonymous posts, but you can't moderate anonymous comments.

6. Customize host and organizer calendar invitations and Teams notifications.

   Important: After you create the invitation, you can no longer change the calendar invitation setting. 

Best practices

Hosts and organizers can enhance the AMA experience by applying one or more of the following best practices.  

Share, edit, or delete an AMA

Utilize the Share to Storyline and Copy link features to announce the AMA in popular communication channels such as large group chats, communities, and email distributions. You can Edit permissions or Delete an AMA by selecting the More icon on the AMA page.

Participate in an AMA 

Participants can attend an AMA event by entering directly through the AMA link sent by the AMA leader / organizer or through the AMA events section in the right navigation pane on the leader’s Storyline. You can engage in AMAs with upvotes, replies, and reactions to questions.

• On the Viva Engage home screen, search for the leader’s Storyline.

• Once on the leader’s Storyline, select View more AMAs in the AMA events section.

Add AMA to your calendar

Participants can add an AMA event to their calendar. Anyone can add AMAs to their home network. Once added, the AMA appears in your calendar as a 30-minute meeting. 

Note: If you delete the calendar invite, the AMA page still shows as Added. Additionally, if the organizer changes the AMA event time or date, the calendar invite is not updated. 

AMA analytics

Organizers and hosts can view analytics for their AMA event page. Analytics update in real-time, showing you a summary of attendees, engagements during the event, and questions asked before and after your event. A time stamp at the bottom of the analytics summary card shows you when the data was last refreshed.

Engagements include questions asked, replies, upvotes and any marked reactions on questions. Anonymous user engagement is excluded from the percentage of attendees engaged calculation. 

Export event posts

​​​​​​​Organizers and co-organizers can export event posts from the AMA feed across the event's lifecycle from the More menu. You can download the event posts activity in the form of a .CSV file.

Each record in the downloaded CSV file contains the following fields:

• Type: Whether the post was a discussion, question, or comment

• Content: The verbatims of each post.

• State: Whether the post was in review, published or dismissed

• Reaction count: The total number of reactions in the conversation

• Upvote count: The total number of upvotes in the conversation

• Source: Whether the post was made by an organizer or attendee

• Identity: The person who submitted a post

• Timestamp: What time each post was submitted

• Conversation ID: A unique number assigned to a specific post

• Reply to ID: The conversation ID of the post that a comment was responding to

The downloaded file contains posts from the previous 28 days. Older content won't be available in the file but remains in the AMA feed.

Network admins can manage access to this feature at the tenant level by going to Settings and opening the Engage Admin Center. Select Admin settings > Tenant settings > Content management. Content management is enabled by default, but you can turn it off. If you disable the setting, organizers of Engage events can't download event posts.

Frequently asked questions