Poll Everywhere Blog

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.

We’ve added instructions for how to use your live Poll Everywhere polls inside 280 Slides presentation.

If you’re not aware yet, 280 Slides is a breakthrough in web application design and usability.  It’s like PowerPoint for the web, and it’s even more powerful than Google Presentations. Using standard web technologies, they have proven that you can transform a regular web browser into something that practically feels like a desktop application and they’ve managed to make it look really good, too.

Since we think 280 Slides is such a great app (and totally free), we believe our customers will find it useful and may want to use it with Poll Everywhere. It’s perfect for when you don’t have PowerPoint installed, or you want to share a presentation easily.

If you create a slideshow in 280 Slides, you can still download it into PowerPoint 2007. Don’t forget that Poll Everywhere supports native slide format downloads for both PowerPoint 97-2003 and PowerPoint 2007.

This is just one more way that we’re making it easy for you to use polls from Poll Everywhere in your next meeting or event.

For the latest release of Poll Everywhere, we improved many small but important details. The most visible of these improvements are in the charts. During Brad’s time at NECC he noticed that a lot of presenters didn’t change the default poll settings, making the charts unreadable in larger rooms. In response to this problem we made the text message voting keywords appear in the chart area, which comfortably allows all text in the chart to be bigger.

Our customers asked for clear and visible voting instructions, and a way to show that votes are being received without exposing the popular choice too soon.  Therefore we also added a “Hide Results” button. This view shows the options that the audience can respond to as well as a real-time running total of the responses.

For customers subscribed to our premium plans, we added a few additional variables to the custom reply message that you can configure.  When participants respond to your polls via text message or over the web, you can automatically reply with information like the total number of responses received for that poll.

Nobody likes to lose their audience’s valuable feedback.  Our polls now send their creators a short email notification if they fill up to 95% of their capacity.

A little while ago we had the opportunity to use Poll Everywhere at an event that Bob Metcalfe presented at.  Bob co-invented Ethernet, founded 3Com, and is now a partner at venture capital firm Polaris.  His only suggestion was that the error messages weren’t clear enough, so we made them smarter.  They will be much more intuitive to our web, smartphone, and SMS voters.  Smarter error messages make for a less confusing experience if a user responds to a poll incorrectly.

We figured Bob was worth listening to.  So are you!  Tell us what you need, and we just might build it.

We’ve improved our embedded web widgets so that people can simply click on the option they wish to choose as opposed to text messaging their results to your poll. This makes it much easier and less confusing for users to cast votes on your website or blog. After all, if you’re already browsing the web, why would you have to send a text message to respond rather than just vote over the web? We though it was more in line with what people have become accustomed to doing over the web and that is web-based polling.

To embed a poll in your blog or website:

1. Login to Poll Everywhere
2. Create or select a poll
3. Towards the bottom click “Embed in Blog or Web Page”
4. Copy and paste the code snippet into your blog or web page
5. Open your poll and let the voting begin!

Try it for yourself! Click on any of the options below to vote for your favorite color:

A number of customers, for various reasons, want to send back custom text messages when people respond to a poll. Here are few reasons why customers have asked us they want this:

• Brand the message to your own organization or build up interest (”Smart Corp. welcomes you to our Annual Conference. We have some very exciting news for you. Stay tuned.”).
• Indicate what the correct answer was for a multiple choice poll or provide an interesting fact (”Did you know that…”).
• Provide a code or registration key as a receipt that someone has voted or provides entry into something else at an event.
• Customize a message that provides some kind of follow-up (e.g. “Thanks for voting. Come see us at booth #123″ or “Next event is at noon tomorrow. See you then!”)

What does this new feature look like? You can see it in the screen where you edit your polls.

And the respondents see that message on whatever device they use (cell phone, web, smartphone, PDA, iPhone) to respond to your poll:

This is another great feature we hope our customers with premium plans will enjoy. As always, you can still use our default reply that confirms a person’s response to your poll or not send any message at all.

Until now, there was no way to identify who voted on your polls in Poll Everywhere. You could view summarized data, view detailed results and the time they were received, but you could not link an individual response to a specific person.

We know unique voter/respondent identification is important and so we’ve cooked up a way to get access to this information while simultaneously protecting a participant’s privacy.

How does one get a respondent’s phone number, name, or other identifying piece of information? Just ask them, and hopefully tell them why you need that information. The key to this is creating a free-text poll in Poll Everywhere asking an identifying question like, “What is your first and last name?” and allowing the audience to text in their response. Customers on a premium plan can then use the new Reports tab to tie together a respondent’s answers across multiple polls. In technical speak, this is cross-tab that correlates responses by phone number or session cookie. See the following screen shots:

…and the generated report…

With these exciting new capabilities, it is now possible to do some really great things:

• Build profiles of customers or attendees (anonymously or not)
• Grade students & take attendance
• Create short surveys
• Download results from many polls at once

These new features will be available to all premium subscription customers. We hope you enjoy the ability to get even more value out of your data.

Poll Everywhere was the first product to make mobile phone voting and SMS polling easy: You never have to call us or go through a lengthy sign-up process. We’re now introducing mobile web voting. This is a little different from our regular web voting where you distribute a private link to your poll. While you could always use a cell phone’s web browser to vote, traditional “web voting” was best suited for blog and email distribution. Now we have a streamlined interface for people to cast votes or send txt2screen using their mobile phone’s web browser: http://poll4.com

Some customers have asked about the costs of text messaging. Many people have a text messaging plan that costs less than $0.01 per message; those that don’t may pay between $0.05 and $0.20 per message. This can add up over time for frequent users. Mobile web voting uses a cell phone’s web browser to send messages directly to Poll Everywhere, effectively making the per-message cost free for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and other smartphone users who have a data plan.

Just tell your audience or classroom to use their phone’s web browser and enter poll4.com (think, “Poll For” - we kept the address short because typing on a phone’s keyboard can be a pain). Poll4.com contains a box to submit a vote, just like sending a text message straight to our SMS short code. That’s it! It works for both free text and multiple choice polls.

To learn even more about this great new way to vote, go here.

We’re always improving. And you’re going to see a whole lot of improvements in the coming months.

We’ve made some enhancements to our user interface to allow for more apparent placement of key features and information. We also now offer a download link for PowerPoint 97-2003 files - and there’s a story about how that came about.

We saw a great video of some folks demoing Poll Everywhere at a conference. Everything went well and the audience was impressed. However, towards the end of their demo, they were looking at our PowerPoint functionality and ran into a snag because the computer they were using had an earlier version of PowerPoint. The manual instructions we provided for embedding polls into older versions of PowerPoint were 17 steps long! The presenters simply gave up on that portion of the demo. This really impacted us. We decided that despite the technical challenges, this is too much of a burden for our customers. We put other things on hold and focused on making it easy to download a PowerPoint 97-2003 (.PPT) version of the poll.

As for the user interface changes, we changed the tabbed interface and made the most important related functions a sub-menu.

Each poll now has an icon that indicates the type of poll.

You can now see your account users from the My Account tab.

We hope you find these changes useful. If you have more good ideas for us, let us know about them!

Our customers asked and we’re happy to deliver.

Every plan, from Free through Max, can now set up free-text polls that allow your audience to express themselves freely. Instead of texting in their vote for a single option in a multiple choice poll, your audience can express themselves with words, phrases, their own names, questions for the presenter - anything you can say with a text message. The answers are displayed on the Poll Everywhere website, and will soon be available as live PowerPoint slides. Here are some potential uses:

• Use it as a tool to moderate anonymous questions from large audiences. You can display audience submissions to the presenter or moderator, allowing them to choose which issues to address.
• Use it as a brainstorming tool to allow everybody to contribute their ideas to the digital projector: “What should our new brand slogan be?”
• Allow students to text in short answers, much easier than with any clicker-based system: “What would be an effective Spanish book title for “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in Latin America?”
• Create social artwork in public places like an sms2screen or “SMS graffiti” display.
• Use them as ice-breakers before a presentation on stage. Or ask a question that many people commonly answer incorrectly because of a popular myth, right before opening your speech or presentation which dispels it.

Multi-user accounts allow many users to share a single premium plan that is paid for by an organization. For example, a market research company may purchase 70,000 votes in our Max plan and make Poll Everywhere available to all their employees and clients. Entire universities or departments can purchase a plan for all their professors and staff. Each educator will have a separate user account that draws from the institution’s pool of purchased votes.

We’ve got more exciting stuff in the cooker. Visit us again soon!

Sean, Brad, & Jeff

The Condense team is pleased to present our customers with a host of new features to make using Poll Everywhere even more enjoyable, and a new subscription model that gives everyone more votes for less!

Subscriptions

Based on your feedback, we’re moving from prepaid vote packages to a monthly subscription model. We’ve made sure that everyone who paid for votes now receives at least that many votes every month!

Due to strong demand, we’re introducing an exciting free plan for anyone who wants to try Poll Everywhere. Instead of 100 free votes for signing up, our free package now includes 1,000 free votes per month! You can stick with the free plan as long as you like and easily upgrade if you need to accept more than 30 votes per poll. You can also downgrade to a lesser plan at any time, without any hassle.

PowerPoint 2007 Slide Downloads

We love being able to embed polls into PowerPoint without installing anything, but the old way was a little clunky. So we’ve created the ability to download a PowerPoint 2007 file pre-loaded with your poll. This means that if you’re using PowerPoint 2007, you don’t have to follow the 17 steps listed on the old instructions page to get a poll into PowerPoint!

This saves time and makes it easy for you to take the embedded poll and copy-paste it into another presentation. As always, you can copy it into multiple slides or resize it in order to display prompts and figures on the same slide. If you’re working with many polls in the same presentation, the old method of copy-pasting the poll URL still works fine.

Gizmos (or widgets) for Web Pages and Blogs

Our tech-savvy customers were already embedding polls in their blogs and websites. We’ve now made this easy for anyone. Look for the Share section on the right-hand navigation when editing/viewing your polls. You can copy-paste some simple code into any web page that supports HTML such as blogs, wikis, Course Management Systems, or discussion forums.

Graphical Chart Updates

You may notice some subtle enhancements to our charts which make them look better at different sizes and resolutions. This will help our customers who are displaying the graphical polls in smaller spaces, such as a blog or mobile device.

Enjoy!