Polls are a great way of collecting inputs from your audience. Whether you're organizing a (remote) company meeting, a conference, or teaching a class, you can use them to lighten up the mood, test knowledge, or ask for feedback.
You can choose from various types of single polls, run a Quiz, or activate multiple polls at once via Survey.
Here’s a quick how-to video on how to set up a poll:
To start with polls, create a Slido event first. In the Live Polls tab, select your poll type or use our templates for inspiration:
When creating a poll, you can also add its description under the three-dot menu. Once your poll is ready, click the green play icon to activate it. If you want to activate multiple polls at the same time, create a Survey.
Quick tip: Character limit in polls
Your poll question can contain up to 256 characters. Another 256 characters are available for the poll description. There's no character limit for open text poll responses from the audience.
Multiple choice poll
Poll the audience with a multiple choice question to learn more about their preferences and opinions. A multiple choice poll is also a quick way to check your audience's understanding of presented content in real-time.
Each option in a multiple choice poll can be up to 256 characters long.
Check Allow attendees to select multiple options to enable the users to pick more than one option.
Word cloud
A word cloud turns open-text responses into a cloud of words whose size will depend on how many times they have been submitted by the participants. To learn more about how it works, check our What is a word cloud article.
Quiz
Test the knowledge of your audience, be it a training session, exam, or trivia night. For a more detailed guide, read the Run a Quiz via Slido article.
A quick quiz with up to 5 questions works like a charm to engage the audience and to drive healthy competition. You can add a picture to your questions or use the random question generator icon if you run out of ideas.
Rating poll
Create a rating poll and allow attendees to send feedback on your presentation or rate their experience.
Open text poll
Use the open text poll to have attendees type in words or longer text.
Please note that the open text poll is limited to 5000 responses to optimise performance.
Ranking poll
Learn about your participants’ preferences by letting them prioritize the options with a ranking poll. To find out more, read how to Run a ranking poll.
Survey
Create a Survey to run multiple polls at the same time, collect feedback, rate multiple items and add an "other" option to a multiple choice poll. For a more detailed tutorial on Surveys, read the Run a Survey via Slido article.
Surveys are available in all paid plans.
To create a survey when you already have polls in your event, click Create poll and then hit Survey.
Alternatively, you can start with any type of poll and then click Create a survey at the bottom to add more questions.
If you’ve created multiple single polls that you would like to turn into a survey, you can simply merge them.
Useful information and tips:
Tip 1: Reorder polls
Drag and drop the polls to rearrange them.
- Tip 2: Additional poll options
Go to Settings - Features and expand Live Polls to set the fixed order of multiple choice poll options, to change the format of the poll results, or to hide the vote counter in Present mode.
- Tip 3: Test your polls
It's always a good practice to test everything before you go live. Activate your poll by clicking the green "play" icon, then navigate to the left-hand-side and click the Participant mode button. Cast a vote and observe how the results change in real-time. Finally, click to Present mode button in the upper right corner and open the link in another tab or in full-screen to check how the results will look for the participants.
To learn more about testing in advance, read our Test your event article.
- Tip 4: Reset your poll results
Once you're done with testing, click the three vertical dots next to your poll and select reset results. To reset your polls in bulk, hover on the poll icon until a square appears. Then, select the polls you want to set back to zero and hit the "bin" icon on the top.
- Tip 5: Share your polls with participants
Display Present mode on your screen to let participants join via event code. Your audience will be able to use the event code during the dates you set up for your event. Alternatively, you can send out the direct link or a QR code to your event via email or internal platform or collect votes, crowdsource questions, and brainstorm ideas during or even before your event.
