Poll Everywhere Blog

Want an interesting way to raise money at your next event? Whether you’re thinking of hosting a charity dinner fundraiser, silent auction, or any event where you’re raising money for a cause, you can use Poll Everywhere to help you add fundraising excitement.  Participants can pledge using their cell phones, and donate anonymously or with their names.

How does this work? There is new type of service we are offering called Pledge Polls. Currently in beta, you create one for your event and set a goal for the amount you are trying to raise, say $10,000. During your event, you can display our animated pledge thermometer (and customize the look & feel, too) on a giant projector. People at your event text in a dollar amount to signal their pledge and it shows up on-screen in real-time! Even better, people can add a message after their pledge amount, adding a dedication note, giving thanks, or sharing their inspiration.

No money is exchanged during this process but after your event, you contact us and we process the payment for each pledge from donors. The fee for this service is 5% per pledge with a minimum fee of $1.50 and a maximum of $10.00, plus any applicable credit card transaction fees (about 2.5%). Donors can also pay by check as well, avoiding any credit card transaction fees. We send you a check for the total amount collected minus the service and applicable transaction fees. You can read the detailed terms here: http://polleverywhere.com/pledge-terms

What does it look like, you ask? Here is the default poll but it’s possible to customize the look and feel with fonts and colors, and embed it in PowerPoint to add your logo.

Pledge poll service is only available in the United States. Give us a call and we’ll help you out.

So go ahead, let us help you raise money and connect with your donors using Poll Everywhere Pledge Polls!

We are very excited to announce our beta roll-out of Poll Everywhere service in Canada!

If you already have an account and you want to use Poll Everywhere, load up your profile page and change your “coverage area” to Canada:

If you don’t have a Poll Everywhere account head to our plans page, sign up, and pick Canada from the “text message coverage” area.

For those of you who are waiting for Poll Everywhere to show up in their country; don’t worry! We are working on offering service in even more countries so stay tuned!

1. To participate in a poll, your audience has to text the word CAST followed by a space and a randomly assigned number. This can be unintuitive for first time texters.
2. Our text message replies are currently built on a wonderful service called TextMarks which supports its business by tagging SMS replies with a short text ad. We’d prefer to be ad-free because it encourages your audience trust the overall service to be spam-free.

In a couple short weeks, we’ll finally remedy both annoyances because we’ll have our own SMS short code. We’re also going to let premium subscription customers choose their own keywords (there will be no per-keyword fee). Free users will still have numeric keywords automatically assigned, but without the CAST prefix.

Some savvy observers may be thinking, “What about keyword land grab?” Not to worry, we have a good solution to follow soon.

The process of obtaining a short code is neither pleasant nor rational. You have to pay for the non-functional short code for months while the mobile carriers hobble through their approval and provisioning process. We calm ourselves by imagining an artisan from the 1800s working a huge pile of new short code applications, but taking the time to lovingly craft each short code with care. Our baby has been three months in the making.

We want to acknowledge that Ariel at TextMarks has been wonderful to work with. If it wasn’t for TextMarks, we would never have gotten off the ground. We enthusiastically recommend their service to any website looking to add SMS functionality with a minimum of BS and pain.

Bonjour, ni hao, y konnichiwa! Poll Everywhere is unveiling new international text message (SMS) coverage. Hundreds of people have emailed us about using Poll Everywhere in their country, so we’re very happy to finally offer text message service to areas outside the United States. “Beta” features are things that might not be perfect; We’re calling this a beta feature because, while we tested it from five countries, we haven’t tested it everywhere. Be sure to test it yourself on our free plan, and email us if you find any quirks.

We now have text message coverage in the following countries, with more coming soon:

• Asia, Africa, & the Middle East
  • China
  • Hong Kong
  • Indonesia
  • India
  • Japan
  • Korea (South)
  • Malaysia
  • Singapore
  • Taiwan
  • Thailand
  • Saudi Arabia
  • South Africa
  • Qatar
• Australia
• Europe
  • Italy
  • Greece
  • France
  • Belgium
  • Czech Republic
  • Hungary
  • Austria
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Spain
  • Portugal
  • Sweden
  • Turkey
  • United Kingdom
• Brazil
• United States

All existing customers can use Poll Everywhere when traveling overseas by changing their text message coverage in the profile page:

When you return home just switch the coverage area back to your home country.  Paid customers on our three largest plans may run different polls in different countries simultaneously - just give us a call or send us an email and we’ll be happy to help you out.