Poll Everywhere’s Posterous - Evolving Live Events and Presenter-Audience Interaction

First Day of School: New <3 for K12

We have an exciting Back to School announcement.

Remember this blog post? Should we even offer a free product for educators? It's the most popular blog post we ever wrote -- over 35,000 views.  

Two companies saw what we were struggling with and offered to help. Qualcomm and Mobile Messenger have provided us with advice, valuable introductions, and even in-kind services that will enable huge improvements with our education lineup.

K-12 Teacher pricing has been cut by 60% - The $129/year plan is now $50/year. 

It's not just about price. We've been working all summer on education-related features:
  • Improving the Mac applications such as Keynote integration
  • iPad live-results compatibility (announcement)
  • (Very soon) Out-of-classroom surveys
  • Automatic grading. Here's what our new grading feature looks like: 

   
Click here to download:
first-day-of-school-new-3-for-k12-JCqtdBtfxzjFFCfAJdAg.zip (168 KB)

For all our teachers that are already on the $129/year plan, you have several new features waiting for you that the $50 plan doesn't include: 1) You can now send custom reply text messages when a student votes 2) You can use our new Broadcast Lists feature. The K12 Broadcast Lists feature will allow you to broadcast messages directly to your students phones individually or as a group. You can use this to send assignment reminders or even push questions out to students after school. To get started, just click "Lists" at the top of your page. 

   
Click here to download:
first-day-of-school-new-3-for-k12-tJuEHcpxyigkGbAdvHhv.zip (221 KB)

On a related note, all education users will be switched over to a new 5 digit short code (37607) in a few weeks. Don't worry, 22333 will still work.

Educators, thank you for blogging so much about us - that really helps us.  To get geared up for the new school year, enjoy Taylor Mali on What Teacher's Make.

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Custom Goal Poll for PartyLite

Here's a quick shout out to PartyLite one of our recent custom job clients showcasing Poll Everywhere with such panache.

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Power User Tip: Add an Audience Response Ticker to Your Presentations

 Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to share audience questions and comments throughout your presentation? One of our users came up with a nifty suggestion to do just that with a crawler feature that we recently added to our (free text polls) [http://www.polleverywhere.com/free_text_polls/new]. The crawler displays audience questions and comments at the bottom of your slide through-out your presentation, just like how news headlines are displayed at the bottom of the screen on CNN or stocks are shown on Bloomberg.
 
Adding a crawler to your presentation works something like this:
 
1. Add a free text poll to your PowerPoint master slide.
2. Change the visual effect to "Ticker" and tweak the settings to your tastes.
3. Ask your audience to text their questions and comments during your presentation and they'll be displayed on-screen.
 
Brad explains in detail how to add a crawler to your PowerPoint presentation in the video below:

 
If you're worried about snarky comments appearing on screen, you can always turn on (moderation)[http://www.polleverywhere.com/features/moderation] and have somebody preventing those from displaying on-screen.
 
Try it out and let us know how it goes. If enough people like it we'll have our engineers make this easier to integrate into your presentation.
 
As always, if you are using Poll Everywhere in some interesting or creative way, let us know about it.

 

 

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iPad real-time charts and tweet2screen

The iPad is a great as a presenter dashboard or presentation control console.

We have a basic version of audience voting graphs and text2screen displays for non-Flash browsers, such as the iPad. They update live in real-time, just like the PowerPoint and Keynote versions.

It's HTML5 compatible, and should work on any mobile device that supports JavaScript, such as most smartphones.

You could always moderate Twitter using a laptop, but choosing the tweets that appear on the big screen behind you using an iPad is really fun.  It doesn't require an assistant behind the scenes, and you're still able to move around the stage naturally.

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N votes per person

You asked for a feature that will allow a certain number of votes per person.  Now instead of just "once" or "unlimited", you can also set polls to accept 2 responses per person, 5 per person, 42, etc.

What's that other noise? Oh, that's polls processing votes over 500% faster.

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Mullet Features: Business + Party

Business up Top

By popular demand, account subusers who are designated administrators can now edit, start/stop/clear, and report on polls created by any other user on the account.
So be mindful of who you've designated as an account administrator. Administrators can also invite other users, but they can't alter your billing or plan settings.

Party in the Back

Our Free Text Polls are really versatile. They make a great Twitter projector / tweet screen, and are perfect for displaying a moderated set of questions and comments directly within your slides.  They can also be used to collect identities of your audience, be used as group whiteboards, digital signage, green survey, large group brainstorming, etc... you've shown us the possibilities are endless. 
We've updated it to be faster, more flexible, and more customizable.  Here's what's new:
  • Scroll back in time
  • Upload an entire background, with stretch, tile, or center options
  • Start, stop or clear your polls directly from within PowerPoint
  • Click to feature a message.
There's over 20 other improvements in our new text2screen Free Text Poll, with more to come. We've made all these new features available to all users, so enjoy!

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How to Optimize Your Texting Response Rate

Recently a customer asked me "What's a typical response rate for a corporate event audience?" I told him that in in audiences >200 people, we've seen everything from 40% to 100%. What's more interesting is discussing, "Why?"
 
When we reference "all communication channels" below, we are generally referring to your event's printed materials, the projector or big screen, and the verbal channel.

These factors increase response rates:
  • Direct incentives for participation
    •  Credit for participation, or inferring attendance (only applies to non-anonymous polls)
    •  Entry into a raffle
    •  The poll is interesting or humorous
  • The poll is intended to be 100% anonymous, and this fact is reinforced over all communication channels
  • The presenter makes a good case for why everyone's participation is vital for data collection
  • The poll is used to reveal a surprising finding or shared opinion
  • The poll is used as part of a corporate mobile game (team-based jeopardy with scoring, or a mobile scavenger hunt, for example)
These factors decrease response rates:
  • The "worst case cost" of $0.20/message for those with no texting plan is not disclosed over all communication channels 
  • The "You will never receive follow up text messages" message is not disclosed over all communication channels 
  • There's no "How To" visual, or verbal instructions are not spoken
  • The event does not run a confidence-building practice poll first, including feedback of success such as a reply message or on-screen confirmation
  • The subject matter is contentious and poll is anonymous ("They won't know I didn't participate, so I'm not going to risk it")
  • The audience demographic does not text and doesn't have the belief in their ability to figure it out in time to participate
  • One of the mobile carriers had marginal cell phone reception (this is much rarer than we had feared in the early days of Poll Everywhere)
All event producers will of course be mindful of the tradeoffs - you're trading valuable event time to do things such as a text-to-screen warmup. But hopefully this list will give you the tools to decide how to plan your cell phone participation event.

 

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US SMS Number Transition from 99503 to 22333

We'll be changing our US shortcode from 99503 to 22333 by April 19th, 2010, which affects all users and customers in the US.

Why are you changing?

It's easier to remember "two twos, three threes" and we're changing providers to increase reliability. Even one outage in a year is too much when you're standing on stage. Every serious outages we've experienced can be traced to sloppy work at the aggregator, not subaggregator.

How does this affect you and using Poll Everywhere?

This just means that all responses will now be sent to 22333 instead of 99503 for US-based presenters and participants. Everything else remains the same.  When we switch your Poll Everywhere account, all your polls will automatically update (even in PowerPoint and Keynote) to instruct participants to use 22333.

When will the change take place for my account?

By Monday, April 19, 2010, all users and customers will be transitioned to 22333. For the next 2 weeks, some users and customers may be on 99503 and others on 22333.  All accounts that haven't used Poll Everywhere in the last two months will be automatically switched to 22333.  All new account signups will be automatically configured to use 22333. Everyone else (existing active users) will be switched on Monday, April 19 unless....

What if I have an event planned and I have pre-printed materials that say "99503"?

No worries, we can extend your account on 99503 until your event (but not past June 1, 2010). Just email us at support@polleverywhere.com. Let us know when your event is taking place and we will make sure you can keep using 99503 for your planned event. This is only on an as-needed, per-request basis.

How are you notifying people?

Every user who has used Poll Everywhere in the last two months will be receiving an email linking to this blog post.  Also, be sure to follow@polleverywhere on Twitter for service status updates.

 

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Mac Users: Live SMS & Twitter Feedback in Keynote

We believe in diversity here at Poll Everywhere, and as a policy, discrimination is not tolerated. So why have we always had live poll slides for PC/Windows PowerPoint users, but nothing for our Keynote Mac (or even PowerPoint Mac) users? Suffer no longer, Mac comrades! We’ve worked hard to break free from the chains of Keynote intolerance and forge forward to be equally accepting and conscientious of our Mac customers.

Thanks to the work of our tireless team, Keynote slide integration is officially in beta. We’ve taken great care to make the two step process as simple as possible. First, click on the download slide button and choose whichever program you want to open.

You’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this:

Download the Poll Everywhere Mac Slide connection, click “OK” and then put your Keynote presentation to Slideshow mode. Voila, you have a live poll slide nestled comfortably within your Keynote presentation.

Here are some limitations and issues you should know about (and if any of these are show-stoppers, you can always try our hovering Mac Deskbar on top of your slides):

  1. It is a beta offering so if Keynote/PowerPoint Mac slides don't work, we can't offer a refund as a result of their quirks. They're strictly beta/experimental right now, even though they work well for most situations.
  2. You need iWork '09 or later (Keynote '09 or later) and Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) or later. It may be possible that you can find a way to magically make it work with earlier versions of Keynote but it is unlikely to work with anything less than Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6. We may be able to support earlier versions of Keynote but it is unlikely we will ever support earlier versions of OS X. Sorry, it's just an Apple technical limitation.
  3. Currently, you cannot download slides for PowerPoint Mac (instead, you get a .MOV movie file from us and then you can embed that into PowerPoint for Mac). This .MOV file won't work on Windows.
  4. Multiple Choice Polls work, but Free-text polls and Goal polls are not supported yet.
  5. There are no customization/graphic look & feel options yet. However, in Keynote, you can customize the background with whatever you want! It's a transparent background so anything behind it will show through. Here is an example of how great it could look:
  6. Some polls may not look right depending on their keyword character lengths and a few other things. If the graphics look a little strange, sorry about that. We're still working on them.

To all of our Mac users out there; thank you for your patience, and we would love to hear feedback on our latest feature. Enjoy!

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Inc. Magazine: 4 Great PowerPoint Tools

Poll your audience in real time by downloading a slide from the Poll Everywhere site and inserting it into your PowerPoint file. Audience members can respond to questions by text or Twitter from their phones. Results appear in a customizable graph or running list of tweets. COST: Free for audiences of up to 30, then 10 cents to 30 cents per person
via inc.com

Inc. Magazine says we make PowerPoints yawn-proof. True story. In under a minute you can create a poll and download it as a PowerPoint slide, all without signing up for an account.

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