Polls are a great way to collect inputs from your audience. Whether you're organizing a (remote) company meeting, 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, or activate multiple polls at once and build them into a Survey.
To get a poll set up, you must first create an event in Slido. Click on your event, then select the Interactions tab on the top left (Analytics are on the right). Next to interactions, select the + Add button. You will then see the options to Create new interaction for :
Once your poll is ready, it will appear on the left of the admin screen, where you can activate and deactivate the poll when needed.
Your poll question can contain up to 256 characters. There's no character limit for responses to an open text poll for participants.
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.
You can check multiple options by clicking the Poll options cog to enable the users to pick more than one option. You can select how many options you’d allow them to select. This would work well if you had multiple correct answers in your poll. There is a toggle in the Poll options for marking a correct answer if this is the case.
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.
In the poll settings of a Word cloud, you have toggle settings to allow multiple responses your participants can submit as many answers as they’d like, a profanity filter to prevent explicit words and phrases, and you can set a character limit.
Word clouds work best visually with short answers so advise your participants to use one to three words when using the word cloud to get the best results
Open Text Poll
Use the open text poll to have attendees type in words or longer text. Perfect for open ended questions to inspire. You can toggle on multiple answers and show respondent names from the Poll settings if you’d like to see where the ideas are coming from!
Please note that the open text poll is limited to 5000 responses to optimize performance.
Ranking Poll
Learn about your participants’ preferences by letting them prioritize the options with a ranking poll. When you set this up from admin, the poll settings give you the option to select the number of options you’d like ranked, and an option to randomize the options display for each participant.
Rating Poll
Create a rating poll and allow attendees to send feedback on your presentation or rate their experience. A rating poll can be from 1-10 stars or even emoji’s, to get an even better sense check of your participants.
Quiz
Test the knowledge of your audience, be it a training session, exam, or trivia night.
A quick quiz with up to 5 questions works like a charm to engage the audience and to drive healthy competition.
Survey
Add a survey to your interactions to run multiple polls at the same time, collect feedback, rate multiple items and add an "other" option to a multiple choice poll.
Surveys are available in all paid plans
To create a survey, select the + Add button next to the Interactions sidebar on the left, where the polls you have created whilst building your event sit, and select Survey.
From here, you can then build your survey, by adding and selecting the poll types available to you from the dropdown.
For example, you could start with a word cloud, followed by a rating poll, an open text poll to ask for the reason for your rating.
Useful information and tips
Reorder polls in a survey
Drag and drop the polls to rearrange them.
- 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. Finally, click the 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, check out our Test your event article.
- Reset your Poll results
Once you're done with testing, click the three vertical dots next to your poll under Interactions on the left sidebar and select reset results from the dropdown. This ensures the data will only be collected from your live event.
- Share your Polls with participants
Display Present mode on your screen to let participants join via the 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 asynchronously during or even before your event.