Organize an Engage event

Events enable leaders to share their strategy and promote culture while helping employees connect, network, and exchange ideas. Conversations help keep attendees engaged before, during, and after the event. Attendees can join from their computer or mobile device.

Any user can create Engage events on their storyline, and community admins can create Engage events for their community. Engage events support three event types: broadcasts, meetings, and async. With these scenarios, we combine the superpowers of Teams and Engage into a unified events experience.

The roles of organizers and presenters

The organizer is the creator of an event. Organizers have full control over event edit and delete capabilities.

Screenshot showing how organizers select the people who fill roles for an event.

Engage events supports up to 10 co-organizers. Co-organizers can moderate events, change engagement options such as event feed moderation and anonymous engagement, and update event recordings after the event.

Organizers can feature people as the face of the event. Featured users appear on the event landing page. The event appears on the storyline of the featured users, who have access to the event.

Organizers and co-organizers aren't visible to attendees on the event page, and they don't appear on event cards.

Organizers designate presenters to share content and to speak at the event. This is in sync with Teams presenter settings.

Presenters can be anyone in your organization. They can present their screen and share voice and video during the event.

Important: The Microsoft Teams web experience does not support event production of town hall. Always use the Teams desktop app to access this feature for Engage broadcasts.

Where do events take place?

Engage events take place in two locations: a leader's storyline, or in a community in Engage or Microsoft Teams.

Public and private storyline events

Storyline events offer control over when your event is public or private. Below is a breakdown of these two visibility options:

Storyline public events	Anyone in the organization can access and join the event.
Storyline private events	Organizers, co-organizers, presenters and invited attendees (communities, M365 groups, distribution lists, Security groups, or individuals) can access and join the event.

Community events

Community events observe the standard privacy settings for the hosting community.

Engage events in public communities are visible to everyone in the organization.
Engage events in private communities are visible only to community members.

Community events follow the privacy of the community at the time of creation. Table below clearly outlines the behavior of events (already created – past and upcoming) when a community admin makes changes the community privacy settings:

Event type	Change in community privacy	User membership	Event page access	Feed engagement	Live view access	VoD access
Async	Public > Private	Non-member	No	No	No	No
Meeting	Public > Private	Non-member	No	No	Yes	No
Broadcast	Public > Private	Non-member	No	No	Yes (including viewing on Engage)	No
Async	Private > Public	Non-member	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Meeting	Private > Public	Non-member	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Broadcast	Private > Public	Non-member	Yes	Yes	No (including viewing on Engage)	Yes

Create a new Engage event

To create an event on a storyline or community, go to your storyline or community. Select the Events tab > Create event.

You can also begin a new event from the top level of Engage:

From the left navigation, select Create new and choose Event.

The Engage left nav provides the Create new menu.

Fill in the title, dates and times, and other sections of this form. The start and end dates define the time window for the event.
Choose whether to host this event in a Storyline or in a Community.

Doing so determines who can attend the event and where content gets stored.
1. To create community events, you must be a community admin.
2. To create storyline events, it must be your own storyline, or you can be a delegate for a leader and have access to the leaders' storyline.
Choose from the three event types: Async, Meeting, or Broadcast. Async is the default.
1. Leave the Enable broadcast or meeting toggle OFF to create an async event without video capabilities. For next steps, see Async Engage events.
2. Enable the Enable broadcast or meeting toggle to select the choice of a broadcast or a meeting. For next steps, see Meetings in Engage events, or to configure a broadcast, see Broadcasts in Engage events.

After you create an event, the designated organizers, co-organizers, and presenters receive a calendar invite.

Important: Don't make any edits to the event on Outlook or on the Teams calendar. All event edits must be done on Viva Engage.

Moderate an Engage event

Event organizers and coorganizers can manage discussions and responses during an event.

When moderation is enabled, organizers can review question and discussion posts before they are published to all users. Replies can't be moderated. Organizers can also reply privately to unpublished questions from attendees. The organizer can comment on why a question is dismissed or ask for further clarification before publishing. These replies aren't visible to other attendees, and when the conversation is published the replies are no longer visible to anyone.

Anonymous posts and comments are truly anonymous, which means they aren't associated with the user all through compliance and won't appear in the posting user's My posts tab.

Postpone or turn off questions

To start an event without questions and discussions, turn off questions, discussions for attendees when scheduling your event. Attendees won't have a publisher experience, but organizers and presenters can still post. These attendee engagement options can be changed at any time.
To change attendee engagement options before, during, or after the event go to the Edit details button, change the engagement settings, and save the event.

Monitor questions

Filter conversations for Unanswered questions to find questions with no Best Answer.
Mark the best answer (select the Check Mark icon below the answer).
Override a best answer by selecting a new Best Answer or by marking the current best answer as wrong (the X icon).
Ask specific people to answer a question by @mentioning them in your reply.
For each best answer, reference the video location or conversation (in Engage or Teams) where the question was answered.

Calendar invites

When you save a newly created event, organizers, co-organizers, and presenters automatically receive calendar invitations. Any event updates on Engage by the organizer are reflected in this invite. Operation details include:

A received invite can't be edited or forwarded.
If you need to make any changes to the event, do them on the Engage event page. Changes done to the invite won't reflect on the event in Engage.

Change the information for this invite on the Engage event creation page.

Attendees can quickly add or receive calendar invites for each event:

Create new invite: the organizer creates a new invite with the details and sends it at a chosen time to the attendees;
Add to calendar: Prospective attendees can select Add to calendar on the event page to add an event to their calendar.

Important: The recipient's Add to calendar action adds a static .ics file to the attendee’s calendar. Future updates made to the event by the organizer (such as date/time/description) don't automatically update the attendees' invites.

Note: Attendees for private storyline meetings automatically get a calendar invite.

Important: For all meetings, community groups don't receive calendar invites. Add them individually or as a Distribution list to receive invites.

Join the event

On the event landing page, event organizers can find best practices for event promotion and can begin gathering event attendee questions before the live portion of the event takes place.

On the day of the event, when the event is “live”, invitees select Join meeting or Join broadcast’ from the event landing page or from their event calendar invitation, if the organizer separately sent invites.

Beyond viewing and joining events through Engage web and mobile, view events directly in Communities in Teams. Whether the user has Engage web, Microsoft Teams, the Engage mobile app, or the Teams mobile app, users can view and participate in Engage events.

Note: If you copy a link from an event in Communities in Teams, the link directs users directly into Teams.

Manage video on demand (VoD) event recordings

Screenshot of a video on demand that's in place for a live meeting After the live video meeting portion of the event is over, if the event was recorded, the recording (video on demand) appears at the top of the event landing page for easy access.

Important: To ensure the event recording appears on the event page, make sure to record the event. By default, recording is ON for broadcast and meeting use cases. Organizers should confirm video recording setting for each event beforehand through the Microsoft Teams meeting options.

Community meeting and broadcast video recordings are automatically stored in the hosting community’s SharePoint drive. It inherits the community's access permissions.
- For public community meetings, everyone in the network can automatically see the VoD.
- For private community meetings, all invited attendees can automatically see the VoD.
Storyline meeting and broadcast recordings are stored in the organizer’s OneDrive and follow the Microsoft Teams’ access permissions determined by the chat roster. The organizer must select Update recording to ensure that all invited attendees can see the VoD for private meetings and everyone in the network can see the VoD for public meetings.

To update a meeting recording with a new version, select Update recording from the overflow header in the event page, replace the link, and choose Update. The recording updates and provides access based on recording link settings.

After your event ends, make sure to check if your recording is split into multiple videos by Teams. This happens when videos are long and exceed the Teams recording storage limit. All recordings will be uploaded to the proper Engage location. For community events in the hosting community’s SharePoint drive & for storyline events in the organizer’s One Drive, you just may need to merge them together and update the recording link.

Best practices for hosting events

To ensure the best possible attendance for your event, use the following planning best practices.

Promote the event at least 24 hours in advance. Share the event link through posts, announcements, or calendar invites from Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, or SharePoint in Microsoft 365.
In your invitation, remind people that they can join from any device or watch the recording later.
Choose a time that accommodates the most participants across different time zones.
Send out reminders the day before and right before the event - it works!
Build momentum by having participants ask questions in the week before the event.
Motivate contributors by encouraging them to answer questions:
- Filter and respond to Unanswered questions.
- Mark best answers by selecting check mark icons below answers.
- @Mention specific people to answer a question.
After the event ends, continue conversations with follow-ups to unanswered questions.