Polls - How do you use them?

PiperWilson

The title pretty much speaks for itself, but I am curious about the various ways y'all use them.

Are they fun or serious?
Do you use them as a form of ideation?
Do they spark discussions?

If you don't use them right now, do you have any creative ideas for them?

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Comments

Rav Singh

I haven't used them often but in the cases I have, they've been specifically for feedback purposes for both our products eg. a certain piece of functionality and also the Community site itself.

For example, I created a poll to gauge how members access our Community categories ie. via /categories, sidebar on homepage, category following etc etc prior to going live with Layout Editor. It helped to plan some of widgets we display.

More recently, we ran a product-specific poll to gauge an understanding of how users utilise a specific feature in that product, & whether its important to them/their workflow as the product team were considering its removal.

We don't seem to get many votes from members though so I think its something I'll need to promote a bit more.

SamanthaIsin

We don't use them because it's a challenge to get our users to engage in anything and the value just isn't there for polls. If we really have something we need to survey our users on we send out a Google form and get a decent response rate. Better than polls.

If users could respond to the poll without opening the post I think we would have better responses.

stefanieb

Hey There,
We try to use them a bunch but we've definitely found a few extras we'd love to have in polls.

While we try to throw some fun ones in there- we're often trying to use the to get feedback about events, or features we offer through the Community.

It would be wonderful if we could have some more flexibility inserting images as poll options, if we could have multiple questions or branching in the polls and if we could close the poll entirely and display the results of the poll at the time of closing

PiperWilson

Thank you everyone!

@Rav Singh and @stefanieb - I love hearing that your community is participating in the way your community is going. What really excites me, though, is that you're asking them!!!

Would both of you share examples of the questions you're asking?

@SamanthaIsin - Getting people to respond can be challenging. Can you tell me more about "not opening the post"?

stefanieb

Hi @PiperWilson
These are a few recent examples
🗳️Poll: Recommend Content Topics for the BrightspaceHelp Twitter Handle

🗳️Poll: Recommend Topics to be addressed in the Instructional Design Best Practices Group

🗳️Poll: Search Poll

HollyR

We have used them only a couple times, so far, but I'd like to use them more next year. We've used them to get feedback on a specific type of content and got decent responses that were helpful to the content authors. I also plan to incorporate some 'Just for Fun' content - because we're so serious most of the time - to make the vibe of the community a little more entertaining!

PiperWilson

@stefanieb and @HollyR - Thank you! That's amazingly helpful!

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