Use Audience Tools to prepare polls and automatic chat messages for your HeySummit sessions before they begin. Organisers and event staff can manage these tools from the event dashboard.
Open Audience Tools
Select Audience Tools in your event dashboard navigation, beside Event Lobby. Choose Polls or Auto chat messages. A session must have the relevant interactive feature enabled to use it. See Turn on live chat for your sessions and Adding Live Polls To Your Session for setup and access requirements.
Prepare and manage polls
The Polls board groups your polls into Draft, Scheduled, Active and Finished. Use Create poll to prepare a question, or Edit poll to change a saved poll before it opens.
In Poll, enter your question, answer options, response time and result visibility.
In Scheduling, choose where the poll appears. Leave automatic scheduling off to start it yourself, or turn on Schedule automatically and choose how many minutes after the session starts it should open. Choose 0 for the scheduled start.
Lobby polls are started manually. Once a poll has opened, received responses or run automatically, its destination cannot be changed. Create another poll to use it elsewhere.
Use Start poll for a draft, Close poll to stop accepting responses, and View results for a finished poll.
Schedule a chat message
Choose Auto chat messages, then New message.
Select the broadcast session where the message should appear.
Write your message, up to 2,000 characters, and check Send as. Attendees see that name beside the message.
Choose when it should post, from the scheduled start to a whole number of minutes after it. The time uses the HeySummit session schedule, including for prerecorded sessions, and must fall before the session ends.
Choose Save draft to keep it for later, or Schedule message and confirm to enable automatic posting.
You can close Audience Tools or your browser after scheduling. Messages move from Draft to Scheduled, then to Sent after a one-off post. Once a message has run, its broadcast cannot be changed. Create a new message for another session.
Repeating sessions and cancellation
Scheduled messages and polls run again when a session auto-repeats. Repeating messages stay in Scheduled with their posting history. Each automatic poll run collects its own responses, keeping previous results separate.
Use the item’s action menu and Cancel schedule to stop future automatic posts, including repeats. The item remains as a draft.
Cancelling a schedule does not remove chat messages already posted or close polls already opened. Deleting a saved chat message stops future posts, but messages already in chat remain.
Edits or cancellation must be saved before the scheduled item is posted to prevent that post.
If a scheduled item does not appear
Check the session’s scheduled time, that Chat or Polls is enabled, and that the original sender still has organiser or staff access.
Automatic posting runs at minute intervals, rather than at an exact second. If delivery misses its recovery window, the board records the missed post instead of sending it late.
If a message is saved in chat but its live notification fails, refresh chat to see it. When available, Retry live notification retries the update to connected attendees without creating another message.
Use Refresh to retrieve the latest board status. Refreshing or keeping the page open is not what sends scheduled items.
Related guidance
For talk-specific poll access, see Manage Polls from Talk Lists. For moderation, see Moderating Live Chats.