How to Create a Poll with FluidSurveys

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How to Create a Poll with FluidSurveys

14 Jun

Sean O'Dacre No Comments

Did you know that your FluidSurveys account comes with the ability to create an unlimited number of online polls? Yes – even the free account can make use of this terrific feature!

In this blog post we will show you how to create a poll, and we’ll go over the customization options that FluidSurveys provides as well.

Why Would I Want to Create a Poll?

A poll is a useful tool when you are only interested in feedback on one question. For example, polls are commonly used for online votes or contests.

Here at FluidSurveys, we’ve been using polls to see what teams people think will win each day in the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.

How to Create a Poll in FluidSurveys

Once again, we’ve made this super easy to do. After you log into your account, click on “Polls” at the top of your menu bar:

This will switch you over from Survey-mode to Poll-mode. Once you’ve created some polls, you will see them listed in this section of FluidSurveys.

For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to click on New Poll to show you what you need to do when you create one from scratch:

Clicking on New Poll will bring up a new screen:

Click to Enlarge Image

1. POLL NAME
Give your poll a name that helps you to identify the purpose of it.

2. QUESTION
What do you want to ask your audience? This will be visible to anyone who wants to take your poll, so make sure you ask a clear and easily understood question!

3. RESPONSE CHOICES
This is where you create the options for your audience. If you’re asking them to choose their favorite movie, list the available movies here. You are given two blank fields to start with, but if you want to provide more options simply click on Add Choice.

4. MEDIA
You can upload a graphic image for each choice to make your poll more interesting to look at. For a good example of this, check out our Euro 2012 poll. A good tip here is to use images of the same dimension (length by width) so that your poll is more visually attractive.

5. RESPONSE RESTRICTION
If you like, you can restrict votes by cookie, IP or not at all. If you restrict by cookie, a person will only be able to vote from the same computer once (unless of course they clear their cookies). Restricting by IP will only allow one vote from the same IP address. If you restrict by IP, be aware that many companies and households share one IP address among multiple computers. Restricting by IP means that only 1 person from that company or house will be able to vote.

6. EXPIRE RESTRICTIONS AFTER
You have three options here: Never, 24 hours and 1 week. If you select 24 hours or 1 week, FluidSurveys will reset the restrictions after this amount of time has passed. For example, if you set “Restrict by IP” and then set “Expire Restrictions after 24 hours”, you can still only vote once per IP, but after 24 hours you can vote again.

7. POLL RESULTS
After someone casts their vote, you can tell FluidSurveys to show them the total number of votes, the percentage of votes for each selection, a combination of both of these, or nothing at all.

8. DISPLAY OPTIONS
Replace Radio Buttons with Links: If you tick this box, your respondents will be able to vote by clicking on their selection as a link, as opposed to a radio button. There’s no performance difference here, it’s purely aesthetic, so season to your unique taste.
Poll Layout: You can choose to stack your selection options vertically or horizontally.

9. PUBLISH
Guess what this button does?! Click Publish to create your Poll!

And Now For the Fun Part…

Once you’ve clicked on the publish button, you will be brought back to the main Poll page. From here, click on Share to send your poll to people:

The “share” screen gives you the HTML/JavaScript code you can copy & paste onto your website to embed your new poll. It also gives you one-click sharing options for popular platforms like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Get Started for Free!

You can get started by creating your very own free online polls today! There’s a form at the top of this blog post where you can create your own account. Have fun!