Our customers asked and we’re happy to deliver.

Every plan, from Free through Max, can now set up free-text polls that allow your audience to express themselves freely. Instead of texting in their vote for a single option in a multiple choice poll, your audience can express themselves with words, phrases, their own names, questions for the presenter – anything you can say with a text message. The answers are displayed on the Poll Everywhere website, and will soon be available as live PowerPoint slides. Here are some potential uses:

• Use it as a tool to moderate anonymous questions from large audiences. You can display audience submissions to the presenter or moderator, allowing them to choose which issues to address.
• Use it as a brainstorming tool to allow everybody to contribute their ideas to the digital projector: “What should our new brand slogan be?”
• Allow students to text in short answers, much easier than with any clicker-based system: “What would be an effective Spanish book title for “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in Latin America?”
• Create social artwork in public places like an sms2screen or “SMS graffiti” display.
• Use them as ice-breakers before a presentation on stage. Or ask a question that many people commonly answer incorrectly because of a popular myth, right before opening your speech or presentation which dispels it.

Multi-user accounts allow many users to share a single premium plan that is paid for by an organization. For example, a market research company may purchase 70,000 votes in our Max plan and make Poll Everywhere available to all their employees and clients. Entire universities or departments can purchase a plan for all their professors and staff. Each educator will have a separate user account that draws from the institution’s pool of purchased votes.

We’ve got more exciting stuff in the cooker. Visit us again soon!

Sean, Brad, & Jeff