Lesson 1 – Polls

Set up polls in advance and run them during your session

Zoom’s polling feature allows you to create single-choice or multiple-choice polling questions for your sessions. You will be able to launch the poll during your webinar and gather the responses from your attendees. You also have the ability to download a report of polling during and after the webinar. Polls can also be conducted anonymously, if you do not wish to collect attendee information with the poll results.

Hosts and co-hosts can launch polls, but only the host is able to create new polls. Hosts and co-hosts are also not able to vote in polls themselves. When launching the poll, they can choose whether or not panelists are able to participate.

You can have up to 25 polls in your meeting or webinar.

Four steps in this lesson:

Learn why you might want to use polls
Watch a video on how to set them up (caveat)
And read this article for more set-up details
Key things to remember

Why use polls?

Polls are an excellent way to find out what people think, no matter how many participants you have. Use polls to ask virtually any question that participants can answer by choosing from a variety of responses.

One of the best features of polls is that you can share the results instantaneously with a visual representation of how folks responded.

Examples:

On a scale of 1-5, how do you rate this online course? (Please select 1 for “bad”, 2 for “mediocre”, 3 for “okay”, 4 for “pretty darn good” and 5 for “quite possibly super-duper”)
What are the top three priority issues in your sector? (Select up to three: “Burn-out”, “Covid-19 outbreaks”, “Staffing levels”, “Overall health and safety”, “Austerity bargaining”, “Member engagement”…)
What are the chances the RedBlacks will take the Grey Cup this year? (Choose one: “Nil zilch zero”, “Um, probably not”, “Well maybe”, “Quite possibly” or “Oh for sure”)

Watch this video to see how to set polls up

Here’s a helpful video by Michel Emery of the Yukon Teachers’ Association. Michel walks us through how to set polls up and how to run them during an event, and he talks about why to use them.

Caveat: your job is not to know how to run the poll during your meeting or caucus, but to think of good poll questions to give to the folks who will organize and conduct the polls at your say-so. You set all this up in advance of your session.

If you don’t want to learn *how* to set polls up, skip to 2:50 to see what he says about *why* to consider using polls.

Read this Zoom article if you want more detail on setting polls up (optional; see caveat, above)

Remember, it’s the account holder who sets up the polls.

Key things to remember:

These meetings will be bilingual, so polls need to be in both languages. This means we need to keep questions short and simple
Consider a mix of tones – some serious poll questions, some fun
You can run as many of these as you like