Once you've created a Town Hall event, see this KB article to learn how to run the event.

Concepts

The Event group

• Organizer
• Co-organizers (up to 10)
• Presenters (up to 100)

Event access

• Determines who can join the event as an attendee.
• Public open to anyone including anonymous attendees.
• Your organization only people in your organization or guests of your organization can access the event.
• People and groups only the participants within your organization who are specified in the "Invite attendees" field can access the event.
• Note: The Event access setting cannot be adjusted after the event is published.

Invite Attendees field

• Used to distribute event invitations with Town hall emails, and to specify which users have access to the event when the "People and groups" Event access is selected.
• 500 individuals, and up to 20 DL, M365 groups. This can expand to 3000 individuals.
• This is where you would add Everyone at Border group.
• Enable attendee emails - attendee invites will be distributed when the event is published.
• Don't Publish until ALL prep work is completed e.g. themes and email content.

Producing the Event

• Once the event is under way, the Organiser, Co-organiser and potentially the presenters can control and direct the event, similar to the way a TV director, bringing the event's presenters and content into focus and switching them back when they have finished.
  
• IMPORTANT AUDIO SETTING: make sure that anyone who is to share content has their Teams and computer audio output set to the same device. This will ensure that any sound playback from videos etc can be heard by the audience.
  
• Press WIN+CTRL+V to open your sound output settings, note which device is active, or select the one you want to use.
• In this example below, the Organizer has set their speakers to be used for audio output.
  
     
  
  

Creating the Town Hall event

A Teams Town Hall meeting must be created from within the Teams calendar, not from your calendar in Outlook. 

Open Teams -> Calendar At the top right click the down arrow at the right of the New button and select Town Hall
Set up the event's basic details Title Date, time etc Add a description Click Save Set up the Event Group You will be the Organizer Add any Co-organizers Add Presenters Click Save Set your event attendees This where you would invite for example Everyone Border Group, or the Technology Team Click Save       Note: The attendees won't be invited to the event until you Publish the event later further down this list.
Set Event Access Choose from Public, Your Organization, or People and groups (See Concepts for an explanation of the access levels)
At the top of the screen click Meeting Options. Meeting Access Optionally enable People dialling in can bypass the lobby. This is for people who must attend via a phone i.e. not using Teams. Who can admit from the lobby. Set this to at least Organizers and co-organizers. Show meeting info on join screen. This controls who can see information about the meeting once they have joined.
Production tools Here you can set who can control and produce the event once it is under way. These are the people who switch presenters in and out, control the screen layout, share screens etc. We recommend setting this to Organizers and co-organizers. Enable green room. Turn this on, it allows the organizers and presenters to check their audio, video and content before the event starts.
Participation By default, the microphone and camera for attendees are set to off and cannot be turned on for Town Hall events. Q&A. Enable this to allow attendees to ask question via the Q&A ‘chat’. Who can manage Q&A. Select who can answer questions. Best to include the presenters here so that they can answer questions relevant to their content. Click Apply, then Save.
Set any relevant Theming. As required, update the Banner image, Logo and Theme colour to suit your event. Optionally edit the event email messages. The email template will use the theming options set above.
Make any final checks then click the Publish button, top right to send out the invitations to your attendee list.