Poll Everywhere Blog

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!

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!

We are very sorry for some recent frustrations our customers have been having when trying to embed Poll Everywhere polls into PowerPoint slides. Customers have reported that after following the instructions for embedding a poll, they see only a blank screen when viewing the slideshow.  The reason for this is due to differing revisions of the Adobe Flash 9 Player. Adobe has released several fixes and revisions since they released the first version of the Adobe Flash 9 player. For polls in Poll Everywhere to display correctly, we now require v9.0.45.0 of the Adobe Flash player to be installed.

Additionally, what is frustrating about this is that versions of the player can be installed independently for Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is because Firefox has its own plug-in formats and Internet Explorer uses ActiveX-based plug-ins. Therefore, if you have the latest version reported in Firefox and are still scratching your head as to why the polls don’t work in PowerPoint, it’s because the ActiveX control is likely not up-to-date. Since PowerPoint relies on the ActiveX version of the Adobe Flash Player, it too must be updated.

If you want to see what version of the Adobe Flash plug-in you are currently using, go here: http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/flash/player/version/show.html * Note that the version shown is the version installed for the plug-in of the current web browser you are using. Switch over to Internet Explorer to see the version installed for ActiveX.

If you want to update to the latest player from Adobe, go here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash * Note that the latest version is 9,0,115,0 as of the date/time of this blogpost.

Since we have issues with users viewing polls with outdated revisions of the Adobe Flash player, we have now enforced the version required into our poll. If you do not have the correct version of the plug-in installed, your Flash player will indicate that you need to upgrade. Once you upgrade, you’ll be able to view our polls correctly and, more importantly, be able to embed your polls into PowerPoint again. We hope this solves many of the headaches that some of our customers have been experiencing. We’re very sorry for any of the inconvenience.

If you haven’t noticed, Poll Everywhere has undergone some major changes. First and foremost is the new Poll management interface. While our old interface was working just fine we came to the realization that it would start crumbling when we started adding some of the exciting features that we have planned.

While our new user interface is the star of the show; we added other notable features including:

XML Results

Now you can download your Poll Everywhere results as XML! This allows even tighter integration between your applications and Poll Everywhere. For developers, this means you can now access results through our XML Poll API.

Time Zones

Did you ever wonder why the time stamp of your results didn’t seem quite right? We fixed that problem by adding time zones to Poll Everywhere. If you’re an existing user, you can click on “My Info” and change your time zone to your locale.

User Information Management

Ok, we should have had this from the start but we finally rolled it into Poll Everywhere.

Now you can change your password, email address, time zone, and other user information from the “My Info” tab.

While most of these features are small; we did a tremendous amount of plumbing work that is going to let us roll a lot of your feedback into our product. You will be able to see the fruits of this labor early in 2008.

We thank our early adopters for helping us make Poll Everywhere even better! To show our appreciation we have given 200 free votes to our existing accounts. Keep the feedback coming and Happy New Year!

After extensive usability tests and some great customer feedback; we turned off vote confirmation messages by default. Our regular Poll Everywhere users that often poll the same group of people (like teachers in a classroom setting) found that the constant use of confirmation messages was unnecessary and, in some cases, down-right obnoxious.

If you want turn on vote confirmation messages check “Send vote a confirmation message after they vote” when creating or editing a poll.

Most of the time you won’t need vote confirmations unless the user can’t see the poll visualization update in realtime or if you’re asking a very large group of people a few questions.