Creating a poll + 📹

Keeping a pulse on your community

Aline Muylaert avatar
Written by Aline Muylaert
Updated over a week ago

Polls are similar to surveys, except they only have one mode of participation: single or multiple choice questions. Polls can be a quick, simple and effective way to get an idea of what your users and community are thinking and feeling at the moment.

Note:

  • A proven way to easily engage your community

  • One-way participation. Feedback or results to be shared after input collection


Step-by-step:

  1. Creating Your Poll

To create a poll, go to Projects > 'Create a Project' press "save". In the New phase created select 'create a Poll' as the project type .

  • Anonymous polling allows you to get users engaged without worrying about, or dealing with concerns of, who voted what - which can be beneficial for privacy and safety in some cases. However, they will still need to create an account and be registered on the platform to participate in the polling.

  • Like any project, ensure that you provide comprehensive and clear information in the project description so that users can make an informed decision to get valuable and reliable data.

  • Also ensure there is adequate time for all users to answer your poll, as some people may be busy or may have simply missed out on the word. So, plan in advance if you need to and make sure to spread the word on your other media platforms!

2. Sharing the results of your poll

Once you've conducted your poll, you can then export the results of your poll by going to the 'Poll' tab in the phase, and then clicking on the box titled 'Export Poll Results'. This will then download it as an excel file.

After doing so, you should then be able to create visualisations on a software of your own choosing, to be shared on the platform. Make sure you do this by creating a dedicated phase on the timeline for the sharing of poll inputs (E.g. Poll Analysis).

You can also follow up on the results of the poll by adding more phases on the timeline for evaluation, comments and volunteers to take action. For example, a "Poll Evaluation" to gather ideas and comments can help supplement quantitative data with qualitative comments to get a better understanding of why people responded the way they did.

Note:

  • As a project admin, you can not delete poll answers on the platform. You may choose to delete them from an export of poll data on Excel. If it’s absolutely necessary and urgent, contact us support@citizenlab.co.

  • At the moment, there are no features on the platform to analyse poll inputs.

  • Currently there is no feature or function requiring a certain minimum number of choices to choose. Users can only choose 1 or many options based on the question type designed (Single or Multiple-Choice respectively)


Do you have any questions or need help? Don't hesitate to send a message to support@citizenlab.co!

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