Frequently Asked Questions

On the surface, Poll Everywhere is a simple application that works well for live audiences using mobile devices like phones. People participate by visiting a fast mobile-friendly web page for your event, sending text messages, or using Twitter. Instructions are displayed on-screen. The poll that is embedded within the presentation or web page will update in real time. Advanced uses include texting comments to a presentation, texting questions to a presenter, web voting, and SMS interactivity in print, radio, and TV.

You can vote by following the instructions shown on the poll when it is displayed. The poll does not need to be displayed to actively receive votes, but it does need to be "started" by the presenter on the edit poll page. In the US, you send a text message to the number 22333 that contains a voting keyword, like 1234, or blue.

You can also vote via your poll's web page on Poll Everywhere, via an embeddable voting widget, on a phone's web browser using PollEv.com, or via Twitter.

As a poll is displayed to an audience, they submit responses by visiting a specific web site, by sending text messages to our short code number (22333), or using Twitter and indicating the option they wish to select. In the case of text messaging, their mobile carrier routes their text message to our web servers where the vote is counted. Once counted, the vote is displayed in real time on-screen. You can learn more on our how it works page.

Yes, a poll is a single question or prompt you are inviting your audience to interact with.

A multiple choice poll lets you define a set of fixed choices that participants can choose from. Results can be displayed in a graph. An example of a multiple choice poll might be, "How many people are on Facebook?" with options like "500+ million", "100+ million", and "Less than 100 million".

A free text poll allows participants to send free-form text responses or short answers instead of pre-defined choices. A free text poll might ask, "What questions do you have for the presenter?" and participants can send in any short answer they want. Their answers might be just one word, a short phrase, or an entire sentence.

A goal poll adds up numeric contributions in a rising thermometer. Goal polls are commonly used for encouraging participation at fundraisers. People in the audience can text in a pledge to donate a specific amount, followed by an encouraging comment.

You can display your audience's answers in real time on a projector for everyone to see, or just on a laptop in front of the presenter. Some polls are not used in live-event settings (for example, radio, print, or long-term exhibition voting), so a live display of results isn't that relevant.

Sure. While most people will administer multiple polls by flipping through slides in front of a live audience, sometimes you want people to answer a series of polls on their own time, or by clicking through a sequence of polls on a smartphone.

On your main "My Polls" list, select some polls, click "Group", and set a name for the group. When you're hovering over the group's row, you'll see a link for 'Survey View'. This link is unique to this group of questions. If you add "/intro" to the end of the URL, it will give you the one-question-at-a-time (next/previous) survey view. That's useful for web-enabled phones, kiosks, or for hiding future questions. Learn more about Surveys.

Note that we're not yet a full-featured web survey tool. We recommend Google Forms or Wufoo if we're missing something you need. Our core strength is live audiences, real-time speed, and visualizations.

Customers on certain paid plans can use the profanity filter and moderation feature. You can either set a profanity filter to censor and replace profanity with asterisks, or you can set the filter to reject messages and prevent them from being displayed. Be forewarned: Vulgar humans are always more creative than the smartest technology. We usually suggest the moderation feature over automatic censoring. This feature allows you to review incoming questions one-by-one and approve only the best.

Remember, "there's no such thing as a stupid question"? They lied. There are indeed stupid questions. You can use moderation to prevent soapboxing and focus on the most insightful submission that your audience wants to hear you talk about.

The numbers are called "keywords" (we call them "codes" when all the keywords are numeric), and are pre-assigned to each option so that votes get routed to the correct option. This allows us to host multiple polls on one short code. Short codes are expensive, so this scheme helps us keep our prices down. If you don't want the automatic numbers as your voting keywords, some premium plans offer the ability to select "custom keywords", like MICROSOFT or OPTION5.

We always show them in bold capital letters as a convention, but case doesn't matter when using them.

There's also an advanced feature called "Sessions" where your audience can first text in an session keyword (for example, "INFOCOM" or "SESSION23"), and then your polls assign themselves simple keywords like A, B, C, and so on. From "My Polls", you first group some polls, then click button "Enable Session" in the group's row.

A poll is active and can receive votes as long as it is "started". If 30 days pass and a poll is not modified by you AND it doesn't receive any responses, we will automatically stop your poll.

We show you the polls that are about to auto-stop in your My Polls list.

If you hover over the "Stops in X days" text, we tell you: Polls auto-stop after 30 days of inactivity. Need an extension? Just stop then restart the poll (and reload this page).

Your keywords (custom and auto-numbered) will stay reserved and assigned to that poll for another 30 days after the poll is stopped.

Absolutely! These five ways give you the flexibility to fit every situation.

1. Your PollEv.com/username page is your page on the web where an audience's smartphones, tablets, and laptops will follow along with whatever poll you have loaded right now, even if you're using PowerPoint. Reserve your PollEv.com name now, or learn more.
2. The generic PollEv.com page for situatons where some will be responding by text message, but others may want to skip texting fees by entering the same text messaging codes/keywords into a mobile-friendly web site.
3. Private links to individual polls present beautiful full-window polls that look great on any device. Here's an example that invites text message voting, and this one is optimized for web voting without displaying the results. You'll find these links under the "Share and Publish" sidebar when viewing a poll. Advanced tips

   When you're viewing your Poll, click on the "Live Chart" link on the right. If you send this URL to people, they will be able to view your poll and it's participation instructions. By appending "/web" to the end of the URL, your voters can click on the option they wish to vote for directly from the link.

   If you want to link to a web poll from your website, you can redirect the user back to your website after they vote by appending "?redirect=http://www.yourwebsite.com/" to the end of your Poll Everywhere URL like this:

   <a href="http://www.polleverywhere.com/multiple_choice_polls/OTkwODk5MDU4/web?redirect=http://www.yourwebsite.com/">   Vote for your Favorite City! </a>

   After the user votes for an option, they will be shown a confirmation message and redirected back to your website. This is useful for situations where you can make links on your website, but your website doesn't work with our other embeddable widgets.

4. Web widgets let you embed the poll right in your own blog or web site. Some widgets only share the results of your poll, while others include clickable links so they can vote and see the results.
5. Web survey links are a direct link to a group of polls (a survey) that can be answered all on one page, or in sucession. Learn more

Yep. If you've enabled Twitter as a way to respond to a poll, then tweets that mention @poll are treated the same as text messages sent to 22333.

After someone Tweets to your poll, @poll replies back to them:

Learn more on our Twitter page.

While the vast majority of people will have a phone in most situations, there are always reasons why someone may not have a phone, such as:

• Does not own a phone (or laptop or other device with internet access)
• Forgot or lost their phone that day
• Phone has just ran out of batteries and did not have a chance to charge it beforehand
• No cellphone reception for their carrier in the venue
• Refuses to respond using their own phone for some other reason

In any of these cases, we recommend events consider the use of pre-paid cellphones for purchase or rent. Check out Cellhire (in the US) or to buy pre-paid phones, consider any of the major carriers which offer pre-paid phone plans. For example, T-Mobile offers pre-paid plans. On the more sophisticated (and expensive end of things), you can rent or buy a few iPod Touches (with wi-fi) from a few vendors. There are even A/V companies who will rent iPads as well, which are becoming very popular for some events.

Typically a vote will be displayed within 2-5 seconds. The delay depends on the voter's cellular carrier and how long it takes to route an SMS message to our SMS gateway, web servers, and finally on to live polls wherever they are being viewed. Poll Everywhere has handled very large events with thousands of responses, and multi-day polls with hundreds of thousands of responses.

If you would ever like to know the average latency of a vote being received and displayed by Poll Everywhere, check out the status page: Status Page

Web and smartphone votes are instant, and Twitter votes are as fast as Twitter is operating.

Most of our users setup their polls to allow a person to participate only once. If that's the case, then generally you should purchase a plan with an "audience size" greater than the number of people that will vote. The "audience size" is the maximum number of votes that can be received by any given poll (the number of polls you can create is unlimited). We've handled much larger polls than shown on our plans page; just give us a call at +1 (800) 388-2039.

The simple instructions are displayed on every Poll. It helps if you provide verbal cues to your audience during the first few polls. For live events, organizers can supplement the on-screen instructions with printed instructions in an event pamphlet. After the first poll, everyone usually gets the hang of it and you can present the next polls at a faster pace. We've created many helpful communication materials for you here.

If you want to improve poll participation, it is helpful to project your ongoing presentation on one screen, and your poll on another (that's two projectors and two separate screens). This gives the audience the convenience of responding whenever they choose.

Take a few minutes for each poll, guide the audience, and then continue your presentation. You can also show the audience the poll on one slide and then continue the presentation and come back when more results have been tallied.

There are several ways to allow people to participate remotely. The simplest way is to allow people to vote on your poll through our website. When viewing your poll, click the "Ways to Vote" panel and choose Web Voting. Notice that this web address ends in "/web". You can send this web address (URL) to remote participants. They will only see your poll and not the controls on the right hand side.

You can also use Poll Everywhere widgets to embed live polls into your blog or website. Voting widgets can be used to allow people to vote from your web site and display the results afterward.

There are many ways. Most people will project our live poll views in front of their audience. This also works for webcasts.

When you are viewing your poll on our website, you can send that web address (URL) to people. They will only see your summarized poll results in a graph and not the controls on the right hand side.

You can also use the Poll Everywhere web results widget to embed poll results in your blog or website. Of course you can also download the poll results as a spreadsheet and share that file with people.

No internet? Just certify your phone number and text us the word "results". We'll reply with a summary of your most recently active poll. For a specific poll's results, just include one of its keywords: "results <keyword>"

Your poll's question (but not its results/responses) is indexed by search engines unless you disable this setting in the Settings tab. With "Keep all of my polls private" checked, your polls are private unless you share the the secret poll URL (web link) with others, or embed the poll widget in a website. When you share the poll's URL, only the poll's owner can see the controls on the right, view the detailed results, or correlate answers between polls.

We encourage you to keep your poll questions public, and draw inspiration from browsing everyone else's public questions as well.

Mouse over the upper right corner of a poll, and click the gear icon labeled "Visual Settings." A panel will appear with several options to change the colors, background, font sizes, logo, and more. Watch the video to learn everything about customizing visual settings.

When you've styled one poll to look just right, you can set all future polls to default to the same by setting it as the template poll in the Settings tab. You can optionally apply it's styles to all your existing polls.

Let's say you've purchased a plan that includes 250 responses per poll. The 251st participant (assuming you haven't cleared your poll) will get a message back saying, "This poll is full and cannot accept more responses". We cannot disable this message; we believe the audience members should be informed if their voice was not heard.

There are two ways: you can either use the reports tab, or have your voters pre-register as participants.

Customers on any paid plan can use the Reports tab. The Reports tab lets you match up a participant's answers across multiple polls. For example, make a free text poll that asks participants to submit their name, a student ID, a pseudonym, their cell phone number, or any other identifying information. Then ask other multiple choice or free text questions as usual. By adding the identifying free text poll and any other polls to a report, you will see how each person answered each question.

Registering Participants is a better fit for repeat audiences such as K-12 schools and Universities. You invite participants (students) by email, or distribute your registration link. They verify their mobile phone number and create a participant login for Poll Everywhere. This way you can see who answered no matter what the device they use (laptop, smartphone, text message). Account administrators can invite participants to register under the Account tab.

Each poll lets you select whether people can use text messages, smartphones and web browsers, or Twitter (or any combination) to participate.

Even better, you can have your voters pre-register as participants, and restrict your poll to only allow participation from that group. This feature is available on paid education plans, and on the Presenter plan and up.

Absolutely, by using the premium Segmentation feature.

First you ask your audience to identify the team or group that they are on. Then ask other questions and compare the results across each team. Combined with grading feature, you can also keep score, too. Learn more here and enjoy our fabulous video featuring the magnificent Honey Badger.

You can grade responses with any of our paid plans. This is popular for classroom instructors and teachers and works well for corporate training workshops, too. First, create a new multiple choice poll (grading currently only works for multiple choice style polls). Next, edit the poll and check off the box "Grade incoming responses" in the upper-right. This will enable new checkboxes under each option you enter on the poll. You can then mark one or more specific answers as being correct.

Once a few responses have been received, you can run reports to get a graded view of the results, like this:

Click the free text poll’s visual settings gear icon, and navigate to the "Messages" tab. You'll see a checkbox to "Show: Participants".

Web responses will show a partial IP address. Text message responses will display the last 4 digits of the mobile number. Twitter responses will display the twitter handle and picture.

Although you can login using a username instead of an email address, we currently still require an email address when you register.

For young students who might not have an email, we suggest you make them up. It's simple to create one email address that can act like hundreds by using the plus sign. In the event of a forgotten password, you can reset it for students from your list of registered participants. For example:

• ridge_elementary_polls+student1234@gmail.com would be received by ridge_elementary_polls@gmail.com
• pollev+sally.student@ourSchool.org would be received by pollev@ourSchool.org

We have a special page dedicated to helping you test international coverage in your country: http://www.polleverywhere.com/international

One common question we get is, "I'm organizing an event in country A. People will be attending from countries A, B, C, and D. Will everybody be able to participate via text message?" This is a tricky situation, and our answer is, "Maybe - but the only way to know is to test it first." Success has been mixed, and it depends on many factors like the home carrier, the host carrier, and the specific global roaming agreements. For example, at one California, USA event, people from Japan were able to text the US-based 5 digit number, people from the UK on certain carriers could respond by texting back to Poll Everywhere's London-based number, and some participants from France couldn't seem to respond via SMS at all. Backup plans are usually quite viable: You can rent cheap pre-paid US phones capable of texting, or if there's WiFi, international participants can use PollEv.com from an iPod touch or a laptop.

As a special case for mixed US/Canadian audiences, if 37607 isn't working for everyone, our 10-digit backup number will probably work for everyone. That number is (747) 444-3548.

No, participants will never receive any kind of spam. They may receive a text message confirmation that their message was received (there is a checkbox to turn confirmation messages on/off in the poll editor). Although results are stored by Poll Everywhere to tally up the number of votes, no participant will receive unsolicited text messages in the future as a result of participating in a Poll Everywhere poll. Participants' phone numbers are never shared with poll creators or third parties of any kind. This is also reflected in our terms of service.

That number is not a normal telephone number and it definitely does not charge anyone to send/receive messages to it (don't worry, we're not a scammy 1-900 company). It is called a "short code" in the telecommunications world and it is basically a special number used specifically for text messaging. That number is set by the company that provides our text messaging gateway, which is how we receive participant text messages into Poll Everywhere. If your audience is curious, just tell them not to worry. It is not a toll number and it will not bill anything besides standard rate text messages to a participant's mobile phone bill. Standard rate text messages in the US usually range from free or $0.01 per message up to $0.20 per message for people who do not have a text messaging plan. Check with your mobile carrier for current pricing.

Text STOP ALL to 22333. We will also respect UNSUBSCRIBE, QUIT, END, and CANCEL. We will respond with the following message: Ur opted out of Poll Everywhere Alerts/voting/Text2Screen. U will no longer rcv msgs or chgs. StdRatesMayAplyFor Help, Reply HELP or call 8003882039. Msg&data rates may apply

Text START to 22333 to re-enable confirmations.

Text HELP to 22333. We will respond with the following message: Problems w/Poll Everywhere voting/Text2screen? 8003882039 or polleverywhere.com/terms Reply STOP to end. Msg&data rates may apply

Unfortunately, no you can't remove the SMS footer and neither can we. We must adhere to the Mobile Marketing Association Best Practices, and this includes clearly identifying what service or company is responsible for sending an SMS message.

This usually means you have texting to shortcodes disabled for your specific cell phone subscription plan with your carrier. Usually, calling your carrier's customer service (611) and making sure texting to shortcodes is enabled takes care of the problem. We tend to see it more frequently on a very small percentage of Sprint customers. You can also reach Sprint here.

If you have tried the above and it still will not work, you (or students or audience members who have this issue) may text in your responses to our backup 10-digit number: (747) 444-3548. Please note that this number is to be used sparingly and only by those who cannot otherwise text to the US-based shortcodes we offer. Also, you will not receive reply messages from this number.

The other potential cause is that you're on a small regional mobile carrier we don't currently support (for example, Appalachian Wireless). The backup number (747) 444-3548 is confirmed working for any of these possible exceptions.

These products don't work with short codes like 22333 or 37607, but you can text to our 10-digit response number, (747) 444-3548, instead.

Note that you won't receive confirmation messages from this phone number, but your responses will still be received.

It is very likely a "fat-fingering" typo from someone else, somewhere in the world, trying to respond to some other poll. The keyword space for voting is a globally shared dictionary. This means that just like when someone dials the wrong number on the phone, someone accidentally may text in an answer to the wrong poll, which might just be yours. Usually, this happens for common keyword typos. Say one of your polls (call it Poll A) has the voting keyword 'HOUSE' and another person, on their poll (call it Poll B), has the keyword 'HOUSES'. If people happen to be voting on another customer's poll, Poll B, some people might accidentally type 'house' instead of 'houses' thereby submitting a vote to your open poll. Some ways to combat this are:

• Keep your polls stopped (so they cannot accept responses) unless you know you are ready to accept responses from your audience. Newly created polls are automatically started for convenience.
• Upgrade to a plan with custom keywords so you can change the voting keywords to something that is perhaps less common. As in the example above, instead 'HOUSE' maybe you use 'HOUSE1' or 'AHOUSE' depending on availability.
• Group your poll questions together and turn the group into a session. This means people would have to join the session via the session keyword first and then text in a 1-character/1-digit response to a poll within that session/event. Find out how to do this here.

First, it's important to check for typos in either the phone number you're texting to, or the keyword you meant to type (damn you autocorrect!).

If you are responding to a free text poll, you may be exceeding the character limit of your SMS text message (typically 160 characters in the US, and 130 in other countries). Most cell phones will send a message that is over the max as two separate texts. When we receive the second text, it doesn't begin with the same keyword, and we can't tell what to do with it.

If you are texting from Canada make sure you are using the Canadian shortcode 37607. You can change your text message coverage area by changing the International Text Message Coverage Area from the settings page.