There are two main ways to register and identify your respondents: An invitation link that you share and importing participants via uploading a list. (Need a quick review? Check out our last participant post here.) This post will discuss how to register participants, when you don’t have an email address for them.

You can also identify voters in a quick & easy (but less formal and organized) way by using free-text polls to gather personally identifying information and cross-tabulating responses across other polls by using our reporting feature. Read about this more casual, quick approach here.

Presenters, meeting planners, and teachers already have a full list of who should be allowed to participate on their polls. Registering your respondents allows you to identify their responses and restict your polls to only allowing votes from people on the list. To upload this list into the system you’ll need to create a .CSV file with your participant data seperated into specified columns. We show you the necessary order of these columns.

Only email, first name, and last name are required. You can also include a password, a US phone number, and a “responding as” identifier for example a nickname or student id. Remember, you can set a default password for all of your participants or even copy the last name column into the password column on import to make login easier as well!

Hold the phone! You just said “No Email Address? No Problem!” What if I don’t know my participants’ email addresses, or they don’t have one (like some K12 students). 

Well, turn that frown upside down gentle reader. While we do require an email address, we don’t require that email address to be certified or even real for the account to function. What does this mean? It means if you have participants without a known email addresses, we suggest you make them up!

How do they login to the system to then vote?

You would to tell each participant what email you used for them if they don’t know which one it is already. If you set a default password for all imported participants, you’ll also need to tell them that too. The one exception to this is if people are responding via text message and you have supplied a valid US phone number. In that case, the mere act of responding via text message from that handset means our system knows who they are from your uploaded list (no “logging in” or “password required” in the case of sending a text message).

Won’t they need to be able to receive email when they forget their password?

Here’s a suggestion. It’s simple to create one email address that can act like hundreds by using the plus sign. That way a password reset link can find it’s way to you. For example:

• ridge_elementary_polls+student1234@gmail.com would be received by ridge_elementary_polls@gmail.com
• pollev+sally.student@ourSchool.org would be received by pollev@ourSchool.org

Besides, in the event of a forgotten password, you can always reset it for them from your list of registered participants.

Looks like you have a .CSV file to go work on. Cheers!