Background

Resolve is a 30-year-old company that specializes in helping businesses create long-lasting, collaborative relationships. They work with NGOs, government agencies, community groups, and for-profit companies on a daily basis to help them communicate and work together more effectively.

Jason Gershowitz serves as the Collaborative Technology Program Coordinator at Resolve. His job is to evaluate a planned interaction or collaboration, and then find and tailor just the right technology, and just the right process, to make that interaction as smooth and productive as possible.

A series of shrinking polls.

One of Resolve’s clients needed to make some big decisions. They wanted to conduct a townhall-style planning meeting with over 400 participants. The goal was to hear from the crowd about what they felt were the organization’s biggest strengths, and narrow it down to three main strengths to focus on.

To get this done, Jason used Poll Everywhere software to create what he calls a Neighbor Dialogue. It involves an open-response poll to gather feedback, provides a space for discussion, and then prioritizes the feedback with a top ten, multiple choice poll.

From 400 voices, three central ideas.

Jason’s Neighbor Dialogue started out as a huge, free response word cloud with ideas from the crowd on the strengths of the organization. Everyone chimed in and watched it develop, while behind the scenes, numbers were crunched. The cloud turned into a list of ten popular ideas. Then the crowd voted up the top three in the final poll. That gave the organization’s leadership the input they needed to move the discussion forward, with the consensus and input of all of the members.

Jason told us, “Poll Everywhere enabled our team to collect feedback from 400 people, funnel feedback into priorities, and gather specific ideas about those priorities, while compressing the process into a two-hour high-energy meeting.”

How can you do this?

Step 1

Collect ideas from the audience. To do this, create an open response poll. In this case it would be, “What are the greatest strengths of the organization?” Display results using the export to word cloud function.

Step 2

As the audience responds, rank the biggest ideas by the number of participants who suggest it.

Step 3

Create a multiple choice poll with the top ten ideas from your open response poll.

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