Poll Everywhere Blog

Our passion has always been engaging your audience by reflecting their opinion as part of your presentation.

Back at the 2000-person Meeting Planners International event, we let people text in their questions for an expert panel. We helped them manually combine questions from Twitter with those sent via the web and text messages, and thought: hey, why shouldn’t this be automatic? After all, using Twitter is cheaper than sending a text for many audience members.

Real Time Moderation

Fortunately we already had our moderation engine in place, so if you want to be sure that only the best, on-topic tweets make it to the screen, you’re all set. We have a video to demonstrate this which features an inappropriate dinosaur pinata named Eddie (a gift from WuFoo).

How the Audience Participates

Each open-ended “Free Text Poll” has a keyword, for example, shout. Just tweet the keyword and your message to @poll like this:

@poll shout Hi, this is live from me to your PPT

Multiple choice polls have one keyword per choice. We have a cats vs. dogs poll, and you can vote just like this:

@poll dogs

Now maybe that last tweet doesn’t mean a lot to all your twitter followers, so coming soon (a week or so) you can Direct Message it to us too and keep it out of your public stream. You don’t have to be following @poll for us to receive your DM.

d poll dogs

Share your polls on Twitter too

We were always impressed by tools like StrawPoll and TwtPoll. If you just want to put your question out to your followers to vote over the web, click “Tweet this poll”

You’ll need to tell Twitter it’s OK for us to tweet on your behalf, then you’ll end up tweeting the poll title with a tiny link to a simple and friendly web voting page:

Who’s Using It?

In the first week we’ve seen people at Google using the Twitter feature, tons of churches, at least two universities, and two languages we can’t even read.

Learn more about Twitter in PowerPoint and try “twoting” (ugh.. seriously? even makes us gag and we wrote it) here.

Your feedback is always welcome! Email questions@polleverywhere.com or follow @polleverywhere

About a month ago, we did a fun side project collaborating with a the brain-trust of companies listed above: GE wanted to allow people at TED to tweet commentary to digital whiteboards in three different locations.

First, people would draw ideas on electronic white boards, usually around how GE could leverage its massive infrastructure and economies of scope & scale for sustainability goals.

The TED crowd commented on the ideas using Twitter.

The whiteboard sketches, Twitter commentary, pictures from TED on Flickr, and general #TED tweets were all sucked into a real-time content routing platform we built in a week called Germane. Germane divvied up the firehose of content via some innovative server technology and a simple AJAX interface to a team of professional content moderators who took a look at things, and the output was a combined into a single RSS feed output with a developer API inspired by the awesome Summize/Twitter Search.  This approved content was then back on the whiteboards and on http://ge.com/ted within seconds of being sent from TED audience members.

When your real-time content (texts, tweets, RSS, emails, IMs, photostreams, blog posts, etc) needs to make it to public screens, yet be kept on-topic and reviewed for appropriateness -  talk to us about using Germane.

PS - Thanks to Jacob@Syrup, Robert@Publicclass, Maggie@Twitter, and Keith@ICUC - you were all great to work with.

This fall I was talking to a group of professors at Notre Dame about where Poll Everywhere is headed. When I mentioned, “we have a bunch of really cool features planned for you,” one gentlemen spoke up and said, “No! I like Poll Everywhere just how it is! Its so easy to create a poll!” After talking more to this professor I discovered that he was not adverse to new features; rather, he didn’t like how old-school software vendors bolt more features onto their product without any regards of the feature staying out of the way.

On top of that, Jeff pointed out that our design took up way too much screen real estate on 1024 x 768 resolution screens; in fact, our old design used up so much space that it became known internally as the “Cadillac” design. The day of reckoning for our old design came when we started to build poll sharing features; our old design simply wasn’t working anymore. A few weeks later, “Brevity” was born.

Our new design (internally referred to as “Brevity”) focuses on making every single pixel count while maintaining the purity and simplicity that you’ve come to expect from Poll Everywhere. This new interface will allow us to deliver more powerful features that stay out of the way when you don’t need them. A great example of such a feature is the ability to download multiple polls into one PowerPoint presentation. This seems very simple on the surface but, truth be told, we went through a lot of pains behind the scenes to get this working.

Lets dive into a few areas that we’ve improved for Poll Everywhere:

Content Sharing & Search

We’ve been listening to our higher education customers and they want to be able to share questions with other professors in their section or department. With a premium Poll Everywhere account, you can browse all the polls on your account and copy them. To maintain privacy, you can not see the results of the other person’s question.

It would be really tough to share content with others without a good search interface so we’ve added search throughout lists of polls.

Context Sensitive User Interface Elements

We built our user interface so it stays out of the way until you need it. All of our page designs have been optimized for readability which meant getting rid of superfluous design elements. We took this to such a level of detail that we removed underlines from hyperlinks because they didn’t aid discerning what was clickable and what wasn’t (everything is clickable!)

Participants

We promoted “participants” to a first class feature so you can see who said what. To respect the privacy of folks in the audience, they have to give permission to specific presenters before their responses can be identified.

We have a bunch of great features lined up that are going to change how people think about audience response systems; but we strongly believe you can’t just “throw” new features into a product. The design and placement is just as important, if not more important than the feature itself. After all, what good is new functionality in software if you can’t use or can’t find it?

The Opening General Session for MPI’s MeetDifferent 2009 conference had a 2000 person live audience and many more via the live webcast. They used Poll Everywhere to let people text in questions to presenters and panels moderated by CNN/NBC contributor Terry Savage.

The video is a good example of how to verbally introduce texting at large conferences, and also shows some nice reminder overlays for video programming.

Questions submitted from the live webcast page were combined with texts to Poll Everywhere and tweets from Twitter. Using our real-time text moderation panel, the most poignant questions were sent directly to the teleprompt screen.  Other on-topic questions were answered later and posted on the web.  Here’s a picture from backstage with the PSAV and MPI tech guys (and the fabulous Brooke).

I bet most in the audience had no idea we make this possible for under $400 + 20 minutes of learning and setup (or even that we have free and $65 options for smaller meetings). As I spoke with people after, it’s fascinating how their expectations for reliable Audience Response Systems are anchored to $10,000-minimum RFP’s and long sales cycles. Bleh. Who needs that?

While Apple’s Keynote presentation application has a tiny market share compared to Microsoft PowerPoint, we’ve found that many of our Poll Everywhere presenters and educators are super passionate about Apple Keynote, or just Apple/Mac in general. When we demo’ed our Mac Deskbar beta at a trade show yesterday, peoples’ ears perked up and they were in love.

Here’s irony: Everyone at Poll Everywhere uses both a Mac and a PC every day, but there was never a really seamless way to use our live-data polling slides in Apple’s Keynote or PowerPoint Mac. Now there is, using the Poll Everywhere Mac Deskbar.

Here’s how to download the Deskbar: when viewing your poll as either a “Live Chart” or “Live Text Wall”, click “Download Slide” and then “Keynote and PPT Mac”.

You’ll be taken to a page of instructions and this video demonstrating how to install it.

While using the Mac Deskbar, tell us about any ideas you have that would make it better.

Verizon has restored service to our short code, 99503. In an effort to level with our customers, here’s what happened. Cell phone companies operate closed private, proprietary networks that are drastically unlike how the Internet operates. For a company like Poll Everywhere to setup a short code, we must negotiate with each wireless network operator independently. This process is known as “provisioning”.

The Verizon outage was blatant neglect on Verizon’s part; they basically screwed up provisioning paperwork which resulted in our 99503 number being disconnected from their network. As it turns out, a large swath of other companies were also disconnected from the Verizon network at the same time.

Here is the good that came out of this:

We were able to quickly switch our paid customers over to the backup 41411 short code and communicate how folks running a poll this weekend could continue uninterrupted. The 41411 short code was provided by our friends at Textmarks, a great service by the way.

We have been assured by Verizon that this problem has been fixed and it will not happen again.

We implemented an announcement system to more quickly deliver messages to customers using our application. Now if there is a really important message we need to send, you will see it when you login.

Finally, in the near future we will be building a page where you can check on the status of our short codes if you suspect there are any network issues.

We take reliability very seriously at Poll Everywhere. We know that when our customers are using Poll Everywhere in front of live audiences, they’re under extreme pressure and it just needs to work. While outtages occasionally happen, the least we can do is be up-front with our customers, fix problems as fast as we can, and take measures to prevent them from ever happening again.

Users on a premium subscription can now change the logo in the upper right of their polls to any graphic.  This is great because you might want to use your own logo, or the logo of a sponsor organization.  Just copy the URL (the link address) for any picture that’s available on the web.  For example, right click any image, and select the option that says something like “copy image address”, “copy image location”, or “copy shortcut”:

Then, paste that URL in to the chart options underneath the “show logo” checkbox.  Simple!

We’ve heard from our K-12 and university customers asking for pricing and plans that are custom tailored for use in education. Today, we’re announcing a new set of plans available exclusively to K-12 and higher-ed institutions. These are designed for for daily pedagogical use and other academic events such as faculty meetings, student government, parent/teacher conferences, student talent shows, and more.

• K-12 teachers and schools, see these classroom response system plans for K-12.
• Higher Education/University/College professors, instructors, and administrators, see these classroom response system plans for Higher Education.

For school-wide or campus-wide roll-outs, we can offer even more customization and better pricing. To learn about these savings for school-wide adoption, please call us toll-free at 1 (800) 388-2039 or if you’re outside of the US, call us at +1 (773) 382-0377.

Lately we’ve been working on boring things like performance, bug fixes, and really big new features that we can’t release incrementally.  So we thought we’d pause and share four interesting ways people have used Poll Everywhere.

1) Pastor Wayne of New Hope explores sin through anonymous texting in church. People at home also participate in real time while watching the sermon on TV. Not only does Pastor Wayne do an excellent job of giving verbal instructions to the uninitiated, the data he collects is fascinating (devotion, happiness, infidelity, gossip, profanity, even offing your enemies!)

(Note that putting the word CAST in front of options is no longer necessary)

2) The Design Trust for Public Spaces is a famous design non-profit that is well known for reinventing the Brooklyn Public Library. They were tasked with redesigning Grand Army Plaza (on the south end of Central Park) and held an architectural design competition that attracted over 200 international submissions.  During September and October the top 30 were showcased in outdoor displays.  The Design Trust used Poll Everywhere to let outdoor visitors cast their votes for various designs via SMS text messages.

Read more about the Grand Army Plaza project, see the 30 finalist’s designs, or see more pictures of the exhibit on their blog.

3) Wes Fryer posted some pictures of Dr. Z using Poll Everywhere across several countries at once during an ISTE webcast.

4) Ms. Hartman’s 6th grade Language Arts class -  6th graders using the cell phone as a learning tool.

If you have a creative texting project to share, email us!