The Quick Poll is a simple tool that allows Users to quickly poll an audience by asking a single prompting question with multiple choice responses. Participants respond to a single question by selecting from a list of predefined answers and are shown the results of the poll after voting.

The Quick Poll is great for ‘checking the temperature’ of your audience on topics using simple questions or for quickly grabbing attention with a simple question.

Results can optionally be made visible to the user either before or after voting and you can choose whether users see bar graph or a pie chart. You can also provide users with the option to cancel their vote.

A Quick Poll is useful when you need to quickly find out a community's preference - eg. what should a park be named. You can use it to encourage participation and quickly assess public opinion on a particular topic or question. It could also be used in quiet times for a bit of fun to keep your members engaged.

Try it for yourself:

Example 1

When you have voted, refresh to view the results
Do you prefer ice cream or chocolate?

Example 2

When you have voted, refresh to view the results
Are you a cat person or dog person?

Settings

Basic

  • Activity Status - allows the User to set the Quick Poll to either an active (on) or inactive (off) state.
  • Activity Question - sets the main question for the Quick Poll that prompts participants to respond. It is also used to identify the activity in the Reporting area of the Dashboard.
  • Activity Description - provides a description that can be used to provide further information about the activity, including leaving internal notes to other Users.
  • Display Description - when selected, the description will be displayed to visitors.

Activity

  • Response Options - sets the possible answer set participants can choose from when responding to the Activity Question of the Quick Poll.

Display

  • Result Display - allows you to select the style that the results will be displayed to visitors after they have responded to the activity. Select between a Bar or Pie chart. Once the contributor submits their response, the results will appear after they refresh the page.
  • Block Heading - allows User to provide a heading that appears above the Activity Question (if displayed).

Advanced

  • Registration Required - sets whether a participant must be a registered Member to make a Contribution or may also be an unregistered visitor. This will override the registration defaults set at the Sitewide level.

Viewing results and reports

You can access your results and view reports for a Quick Poll activity by going to Dashboard --> Reports --> Results. Click the 'View Results' link next to the relevant activity name to view the report.

Information in the report is filtered by the date range, which you can adjust at the top-right of the report.

To get further information about any reporting metric, hover over the question mark at the top-right of the reporting component to view a description.


Summary

The 'Summary' section of the report provides the following information:

  • Key statistics - shows a number of top-level metrics relating to the activity including:
    • the number of contributions collected through the activity
    • the number of unique contributors who participated in the activity
  • Voting results - Bar chart and summary table showing the number and percentage of votes received for each response option.

The summary report can be exported as a PDF by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page.

Overview

The 'Overview' section of the report includes high-level meta-information about your activity including information about whether participants were registered members or anonymous, when the activity occurred, what devices and browsers were used by participants and a breakdown of selected demographic information (for member participants only).

This report is standard across all participation tools. More information can be found in the Reporting section.

Data

The 'Data' section of the report includes the raw data collected through the activity, in a table view.

The data table for the Quick Poll activity includes the following information:

  • Contribution ID - a unique identifier for the post
  • Date submitted - the date the post was made
  • Response - the option selected by participants in the activity.

Additional fields containing the personal information of the participant may also be appended to the data table.

Data from the data table can be exported by clicking the 'Export' button at the top-right of the page. Data can be exported as either CSV or XLSX.

Data can be filtered on a number of attributes by clicking the 'Show Filters' button at the top of the page and adjusting the values. Any filters applied to the data table will persist in the data export.

Key actions

In addition to the main question asked to visitors, the Quick Poll requires a pre-defined set of options that participants can choose from when responding.

To add response options to the Quick Poll:

  1. Navigate to the Activity tab to add options.
  2. Type in an option under the Add Option field and then select the Add button.
  3. Repeat until all desired options are added.
  4. Select the blue Save button.

After voting in the Quick Poll, the results of the poll are displayed to the Contributor. This can be shown as a bar or pie chart to visitors.

To select the type of visualisation:

  1. Navigate to the Display tab.
  2. Select Bar or Pie under Result Display.
  3. Select the blue Save button.

Practice tips

  • The Quick Poll can reveal public sentiment on a particular topic or question, but avoid relying on polls for more nuanced topics or important issues where decisions may be made and people may feel enticed to game the poll.
  • Avoid overloading your project with Quick Polls. A Quick Poll should be a quick pulse check. It usually should not form the basis of your engagement. Too many Quick Polls can lead to a confusing and overly busy aesthetic, and is likely to be unnecessary.