Poll Everywhere Blog

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.

The folks over at LifeHacker discovered Poll Everywhere recently and decided they thought it was a useful LifeHack. We hope you too continue to enjoy Poll Everywhere to create online and SMS polls for live (and non-live) audiences.

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:

CNN had contacted us about the human side (among other things) of live audience polling and response using Poll Everywhere. CNN published that piece online today. You should read it to get a feel for where this industry is headed. We’re happy that we’re at the forefront of it and helping to push the technology forward.

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.

Watch the video below and see how at NYVideo.org the audience is in awe of the close tie for voting the best presenters for May at their conference. As the balance is shifted, you can hear a lot of excitement over who people think is going to win.

Alex Lindahl over at CollegeMogul.com “witnessed the excitement of Poll Everywhere, an inexpensive audience response system,” when he attended the MIT 100K Audience Choice Awards. It’s great to hear from Alex on his observations of how the audience became really engaged and excited to participate in the poll. Receiving just a small bit of feedback (even in the form of a vote on a poll) from individual people at an event captures people’s attention and keeps them really interested.

According to Alex, “they [the audience] wanted to know who would win the prize and if they had voted for the team that was everyone else’s favorite too. They were too eager to know and it drove them crazy. They loved it.”

Thanks, Alex, for volunteering to share your thoughts.

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!