As background, let's quickly review how we let you register and identify respondents before today (this isn't going away).
We provide you with a link you can distribute. If they already have a Poll Everywhere login, they just confirm. Otherwise we give them a simple registration form, and they can certify their phone number.
We found that this worked great for professors; They would simply include their registration link in an online syllabus or course web page. But many presenters and meeting planners already had a full list of who should be allowed to participate, sometimes including phone numbers.
So, now you can bulk import your pre-registered participants with a simple text file.
Why would you want to do this?
- You already know who will participate because you have their information in a spreadsheet, class roster, or event registration survey
- You wish to identify audience members without requiring them to do any work
- You wish to restrict participation or voting to a defined list of people
- You're a very large organization and wish to mass-upload all of your employees' information
How To Get Started
To get started, go to the Participants tab and click "Import Participants" from the menu on the left.
Now follow the directions on the screen.
1. Pop open your favorite spreadsheet program (e.g. Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets) and create some records like this:
We show you the necessary order of these columns. Only email, first name, and last name are required. You can also include a password, a US phone number, and a "responding as" identifier for example a nickname or student id.
Because you're trusting us with their email addresses and phone numbers, it's worth reiterating our promise: We'll never sell, rent, or otherwise share emails and phone numbers entrusted to Poll Everywhere with any organization or third party.
Now export or Save-As... from your spreadsheet program as a CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file.
2. Choose the CSV file that you just created.
Remember, these people will be able login to Poll Everywhere in order to see a history of their responses or to respond using any web device like a smartphone or laptop. To login, they'll use their email and a password. Since the password field per-person is optional, you can choose to set a default password for those empty password fields.
Click "Continue" to upload the file. We'll inspect it for problems.
3. Once it's uploaded, we'll validate the people in your file.
We'll show you a progress bar indicating the percentage of participants in your file that we've validated. Depending on how many records there are, this could be a very quick process (you might not even see the progress bar) or it could take a few minutes.
Don't feel obligated to stick around during this. You can close your browser and go watch TV, eat popcorn or make some Italian sausages. Our little mechanical friends are doing this in the background. You can keep track of the progress on the main Import Participants page.
4. Once we've validated all the people in your CSV file, we'll show you any errors we can fix, errors we can't fix without your help, and all the lines which are crystal clean.
At this point you can correct any errors in your CSV file and start this process again from the beginning or click "Continue" to import them for real.
Just like when we initially checked your file, we'll show you a progress bar as we import your list.
5. Once we're done importing we'll show you the records we imported successfully and those that we couldn't import.
You can download a list of the problems for tweaking and re-uploading later.
6. You'll see all your imports and their status on the main Import Participants page.
Viola! Now you can register lots of participants very, very fast!
Registering participants is included on all of our paid plans, and there's no limit to the number of participants you can register.
Happy Importing! It's summer -- enjoy that Italian sausage.
