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.
Our Presenter Notes and Best Practices page gives you our best tips gleaned from thousands of people using Poll Everywhere with live audiences. We also provide proven visual aids (slides) you can use in a presentation to make everyone's first experience a smooth one.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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
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. This setting can be found under a poll's 'Edit' menu.
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:
Learn more here and enjoy a fun-filled, Animal Farm themed video. It's all the rage!
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:
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 privacy policy.
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:
Text START to 22333 to re-enable confirmations.
Text HELP to 22333. We will respond with the following message:
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:
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.
YES! Simply put a space between each keyword and send them all in the same text message. This works when responding multiple times to the same poll or to several different polls.
Try it out by visiting our home page and texting "LION LION TURTLE" (without the quotes) to the number shown. You should see the graph update within a few seconds.
You can't use this feature to respond multiple times to a free text poll. When you respond to a free text poll, everything after the keyword is recorded as the response, instead of as additional keywords. That said, you can respond to several multiple choice polls as well as one free text poll with a single text message, as long as the free text poll's keyword comes last. For example, "MCPKEYWORD1 MCPKEYWORD2 FTPKEYWORD my free text response" would work, but "MCPKEYWORD1 FTPKEYWORD my free text response MCPKEYWORD2" would not because "MCPKEYWORD2" would be treated as part of your response to the free text poll.
Even if you're only using Poll Everywhere for a single poll on a single day, you still have to subscribe to a subscription plan for at least one month. When the event is over, you would downgrade back to the Free plan. If the plan continues beyond one month, you are still responsible for any account charges, even if you do not use the service. There's a lot of boring reasons for this. Essentially, it's cheap for us to just give you the rest of the month, so we do. In addition, most people prefer to have all the premium features available for testing well before their event. Our average customer support effort doesn't differ much for one-time-event users and recurring users. We don't know anyone else providing this kind of service for less money, so we say: enjoy your month. Please note that with any of our subscription plans, you must change your account back to a Free plan when you are done with it. Unused or forgotten service will not be refunded or credited.
Our basic plan is free. It allows an unlimited number of polls, and up to 40 votes per poll. The free plan includes really great features: Live PowerPoint polls, web voting, widgets, Twitter, downloadable results, and more. Check out our paid plans if you need advanced features or have an audience larger than 40.
The K-12 and Higher Ed plans will be less expensive than our normal monthly plans if you can commit to a semester or year-long purchase. If you're not ready for that, stick with our Business and Non-Profit pricing.
We've tried to make our free plan useful for K-12 educators. If you teach the same subject multiple times per day, remember that you can download the results and also clear any poll to reuse it with a different class. Comparing the multiple runs is a premium feature, available on our cheapest plans.
Your month will start the day you upgrade, and a month of service lasts for 30 calendar days, including the day you sign up. Keep in mind you can always view your next billing date from your order history page.
Please note that with any of our subscription plans, you must change your account back to a Free plan when you are done with it. This is effectively how you cancel your monthly paid subscription but also keep access to all the data you collected. Unused or forgotten service will not be refunded or credited.
Poll Everywhere does not charge anyone for voting on a poll. However, individual wireless carriers may charge standard text message charges, which vary depending on the wireless carrier and any messaging package selected (typically $0.01 to $0.20 per message, but check with your mobile carrier for current pricing).
Not really. There is standard text messaging costs for participants, but this cost is nominal even if they lack a text messaging plan. For cases where people may be responding a lot over a long period of time (e.g. students), we recommend participants add an unlimited text messaging plan through the mobile phone provider. We've also found that many cellular plans already include basic text messaging for free and in some cases unlimited text messaging at no additional cost.
Another great alternative for frequent participants who have smartphones - bypass SMS text messaging completely by using our smartphone web voting feature, or by using Twitter to participate.
No, that's the purpose behind our Free plan. Our investment in that offering is already a large expense and we are not able to accommodate requests for additional free services, even for one-time purposes. The best thing to do for a one-time poll or one-time event or to use Poll Everywhere as a demo, you need to purchase a plan which will accommodate the features your need and/or your audience size.
We believe in giving back and good causes. We also want to be used in front of certain audiences that might be full of potential customers, such as a conference for professional presenters. To achieve this, we proactively seek out the charities we're passionate about and the conferences we wish to sponsor. We've donated many thousands of dollars worth of service.
Unfortunately that means we're very unlikely to be able to sponsor your particular event. Instead, we suggest you find a sponsor in the local community who would like to "power the live voting". Put their logo on your poll slides and thank them during your event. There's no need to mention us. Let your sponsor take the credit for powering the great technology.
Our goal is to give all K-12 educators the ability to use our free version, regardless of class size or overcrowding. The free plans currently let you use Poll Everywhere with any 40 students at a given time. If you have more than this in your classroom, please email us and explain the situation so we can accommodate you.
Note that this promise is for the number of physical seats in a single classroom. It doesn't cover combined classrooms (e.g. 60 at a time) or school-wide polls. The non-profit monthly plans are your best bet for that.
Middle and secondary educators can still easily use Poll Everywhere for free with multiple sections. Just create copies of your polls, or clear your polls to archive off the results between runs.
This is called "Premium SMS" and this is the shady underbelly of the text messaging world. There's dumb services like "sexy texts" or "joke of the day" or "$1 per vote". We don't mess with it. Besides, the carriers take over 50 cents of every dollar collected.
If you are trying to collect money towards a legitimate cause, you can use our Free Text Polls to collect pledges and solicit contact information follow-up pledges or donations.
Just head over to http://www.polleverywhere.com/orders
It's really easy - make sure you are logged in just go to the plans page and click "Downgrade" under the Free plan. You won't be charged again, and you will not lose any of your data, such as polls or their results.
Unfortunately no. By our terms of service, we do not allow refunds for unused service. We really sympathize with the rare situation when a customer forgets to downgrade, but let us explain what's going on. It's kind of like a mail order subscription for frozen steaks. No, our service isn't perishable :), but one reason they have a no-refund policy is because the mail order company can't get a refund themselves from the beef supplier, even if you were to return a perfect uneaten frozen steak. At Poll Everywhere, we pre-purchase non-refundable monthly service capacity in the form of text messaging throughput and server capacity on your behalf. We rely on you downgrading (and try to make it a simple no-fuss process) so we know how to size our purchases correctly and ensure a reliable, speedy system for all customers.
If you think you might forget to downgrade, you can enable an email reminder from us when you upgrade and we will send a notification email 2 days before your next billing date. You can always check your billing status and next billing date in your Account summary.
Through our multi-user plans, it is possible to add other people to your account. This allows you to share the resources of a single account with many people. For example, if you have an entire school and want to share Poll Everywhere with all faculty or staff, you can add them as users. Each plan we offer provides a maximum number of users that you may add to a single account. See our plans for the details on maximum users per plan and pricing information.
To learn how to add sub-users to your account and learn more about the feature itself, read here for more information and a video.
Upon upgrading or downgrading between paid plan levels, we start a new 30 day billing period for the new plan. The pro-rated remainder of your current 30 day plan will be subtracted from the cost of the new plan. Please note this process will never result in a refund (when downgrading).
For example, if you're half way into a $65 plan, then upgrade to a $140 plan, we prorate the $65 to $32.50, subtract that amount from $140, and immediatly bill your account $108.50.
Yes! First, make sure to install the PollEv Presenter app, then login to your Poll Everywhere account and click "Insert Poll" from the Poll Everywhere ribbon. Now press F5 in PowerPoint to start the presentation and you should see your poll embedded seamlessly into your presentation.
Yes! Click the ‘Response History’ link in the 'Views' panel. There is a link on the right to download a spreadsheet version. This file is in Comma-Separated Values format (.CSV) format, which can be opened by any spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or Google Spreadsheets.
Your poll can receive votes even when you do not have a live internet connection but to display the poll or view results in real time, the presenting computer must have an internet connection. Your voting audience will need to have a mobile phone signal to vote, but texting works reliably with even the lowest signal levels.
If you want to build new poll visualizations or integrate real-time voting into your applications, head over to http://www.polleverywhere.com/api to learn about our RESTful API. There's also some other (write) APIs that we only expose after approval.
This is usually a concern for Multiple Choice Voting when a winner is being chosen, or for grading. First, we should point out that "spoofing" or "faking" an SMS text message is nearly impossible. We've never seen it done. If you don't enable "people may respond more than once" and only select "Text messages" under "How People Can Respond" (both are the default), you're poll is very secure.
If you choose to enable "Smartphones via PollEv.com", or "Web widget" (which includes linking straight to your poll's web voting page), there is a chance a reasonably technical person could find a way to submit multiple responses, even if you've disabled that option. This is a tradeoff where we chose simplicity over security. If you need to limit who can vote (and remove this potential for ballot stuffing), you can use our registered participants feature.
Sure. Just copy-paste a long list of polls into our poll creator. We'll create them in the background while you work.
Your import source text should be one poll per line. Most formats will work. For example, "What's up?" would be imported as a free text poll, and "Choose: A, B, C" and "Perfect? True or False" would be imported as Multiple Choice Polls. Be sure to set a template poll if you'd like them imported with default options such as a color theme or poll behviors and settings.
See a quick demo .Yes, if you have your own short code and want to use it, please email us at sales@polleverywhere.com.
Yes! Our PollEv Presenter app can display any of your polls on top of any other application, including Keynote and PowerPoint for Mac. It's smart enough that you don't have to do any weird clicking in the middle of your presentation. Just advance slides like you always do, and when we detect a poll URL in your slide's presenter notes, we'll show that poll. We'll also hide it when you move on. It's almost like your poll is just another object on your slide.
As a fallback, remember that you can always project your poll straight from the web and switch into fullscreen mode.
We have found some unofficial support of embedding polls in OpenOffice Impress but it requires a little work. Read here and if that does not suit your needs, you can still display your poll from a web browser on a projector and switch your poll into fullscreen mode to occupy the entire screen. This is not officially supported by Poll Everywhere so we can't help you if things don't go right but it may work.
Technical support by email or by phone is available on some plans. Check your plan for what kind of support you have. If you're just on a Free plan, you are on your own for support; use this FAQ or the community-powered support.
Regardless of any plan, we also offer various levels of paid or dedicated support, even support for outside business hours or having someone from Poll Everywhere physically present at your event to assist you. Check those support options here.
Sometimes we can accomodate you through a custom solution which we quote separately from any plans sold through the website. Read more about Poll Everywhere custom solutions.
First, be sure that you're in PowerPoint's fullscreen presentation mode (shortcut key: F5). Polls do not display in PowerPoint's slide editing view. If you're having other difficulties, please see our blog post for the solution
When you interact with an object embedded in PowerPoint, your keyboard and mouse commands will be directed at the embedded object. So, in order to return "control" to the presentation, you'll need to click outside of the embedded poll somewhere on the slide. This will return control to your presentation and allow you to advance the slideshow. Make sure to leave some space on the slide to click outside of the embedded poll object, when creating your presentation.
First, let's make sure Poll Everywhere is operating normally. Check out status.polleverywhere.com.
If the status is green, make sure your poll is started and the options and instructions to vote are being displayed. If you have reached the maximum number of votes allowed per poll, you will need to either clear the results of your poll or purchase a higher vote plan.
If this is a free-text poll, make sure that the moderation feature is not accidentally enabled.
Make sure you have the proper country's phone number displayed for texting. You can change your text message coverage area by going here: International Text Message Coverage Area
Your PollEv page will display the poll you have currently Pushed from the Mobile Presenter App or website. Make sure you have manually set the poll you would like to display.
In PowerPoint or from the PollEv Presenter app this voting method is meant to be used in a “live” application; it will stay in sync with whatever poll you have on screen and update automatically.
For the pollev page to follow along when you're presenting from PowerPoint make sure you are logged in. While in slideshow mode (F5), hover your mouse over the upper right hand corner of the poll to display the controls. Under the visual settings toggle (gear icon) you should see a blue log in prompt at the top of the menu. Log in with your email or username and password.
By default, a participant can only respond to a multiple choice poll once, and we don't limit how many times participants can contribute to Free Text Polls. You can set any poll to allow an unlimited number of responses per participant, or set the poll to restricted to a specific number of responses per participant.
To change the number of times a participant can respond to a poll, open the poll you would like to change. Then click the "Edit" link that is just below the large "Stop Poll" button on the right. On the right of the next page, click the "Responses" header and enter the number of times each person may respond. Then click the green "Save poll" button.
No. Simply log in to your account first (you can reset your password if you forgot it) and then click the participant registration link your instructor has distributed.
Your instructor will usually share a registration link. They might send it by email, include it in the syllabus, or post it on a class web page. It usually looks something like "polleverywhere.com/register?p=0123-abcd".
You can also register by signing in to your account and accessing your registrations page. There you can search for your instructor by their email address.
If you don't have a registration link and you can't seem to find an instructor by their email address, you'll need to contact your instructor for help.
Your instructor can always see your email address, but sometimes they'll also want you to provide a username, login, or other student ID.
If you need to add this, sign in and go to your registrations page. Click the "Details" link under the appropriate university, department, or instrustor, and enter an alternate identifier.
Unless your instructor is running an anonymous poll, your name and email will always be available to them next to your answers. If you provide an alternate identifier, they can also see that.
Your full phone number is never shared with them, but in some reports they can see the last 4 digits of your phone number. This serves two important purposes:
No. You will only have to pay the annual cost once to be able to register on any number of accounts.
This usually means you have texting to shortcodes disabled for your your specific cell phone subscription plan with your mobile carrier. Usually, calling your carrier's customer service (611) and making sure texting to shortcodes is enabled takes care of the problem.
The other potential cause is that you're on a small regional mobile carrier we don't currently support (for example, Appalachian Wireless).
If you cannot enable shortcode support, you 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. You will not receive confirmation reply messages from this number.
Keep in mind that to certify your phone number, you'll need to text to this backup number instead of the shortcode.
If your instructor requires you to register to participate (usually to see participation or attendance) and you are responding via text message instead of the web, you will need to certify your number so your instructor can identify your responses.
To certify your number log in and go to your Personal Info page under your account settings. Make sure to type in your mobile phone number and click the certify link. Follow the instructions to send your certification text message.
If you are responding with a web device, make sure you are signed in before responding to your instructor’s polls.
If you are responding via text message, make sure you have certified your mobile number. Once you have certified your number your previous ‘unregistered’ responses will be tied to your account.
90% of the questions we receive are quickly answered online. Search or submit a question below:
I JUST want to contact Customer Service