How to Create Polls

Last updated on January 23rd, 2025

Polls

Everwall allows you to run polls that attendees can participate in and have them appear on your social wall. There are two ways to vote in a poll, and you can pick which method works best for your event. Attendees can vote through any content sources you’ve set up by including the event hashtag (if that content source uses them), and then the category/hashtag that they’re voting for as text in their message. Or, you can enable the Everwall Direct (the web form), and attendees can vote by simply tapping a category without needing to submit a post.

Polls are updated on your social wall in real-time as the votes come in. If moderation is disabled, updates happen almost instantly, creating a dynamic and interactive experience for viewers of the social wall, if the poll requires messages to be checked for votes, then it’ll update instantly as the posts are approved.

We support running multiple polls simultaneously; however, only one poll can be displayed on the social wall at a time. Since polls don’t need to be visible on-screen to remain active, you can choose to display them only when you want people to see the results. As you’ll see in Step 4, you’ll provide us with the the start and end dates and times for your poll to be active.

When shown on the social wall, the poll takes the place of the leaderboard on the social wall for our self-service offering. For Full Service we can make it display in a number of different ways.


How to Create Polls

Step 1: Click the Polls on the sidebar menu to access the Polls page.

polls link

Step 2: On the polls page, click either of the New Poll or Create a New Poll buttons to create a new poll.

create new poll

Step 3: You will be redirected to the “Create a Poll” page, where you need to input all the required details for your poll. Initially, you need to enter the name of your poll—this will not appear on the social wall (only the headline and instructions do), but it will be visible in the list of active polls during voting if you have enabled voting via the web form. You want to keep it short, but descriptive.

Poll name

Step 4: Choose when you want the poll to be active. Set the start date and start time, as well as the end date and end time. These times will follow the time zone you selected when creating your social wall.

poll date and time

Step 5: Categories are the options that people vote for on your poll. You can have as many options as you want, however, if you have too many they may not all be shown on your social wall when you show it on screen.

Poll voting categories

Step 6: For the voting method, you can choose from these three options:

  • Votes must be submitted as a post with a category included in the text:
    • This is the default option, and the only option available if you don’t have Everwall Direct enabled.
    • Votes are submitted as posts with a category included in the text. This works with any enabled content source. While hashtags are commonly used, you can also employ @user mentions or keywords for this purpose.
  • Use Everwall Direct (web form) interface, but submit as a text-only post:
    • Requires Everwall Direct to be enabled as a content source
    • Guests will go to the Everwall Direct web form to submit votes, and after tapping their choice, we’ll automatically turn it into a text post with the category they voted on and those posts will be displayed on the social wall. If you want your social wall to have a flurry of posts appear when voting is active, this is the best choice for that.
  • Use Everwall Direct (web form) interface, and vote without showing a post:
    • Guests will navigate to the web form as if they are going to submit a post, and then can view the poll and tap on their response. Votes will not appear on the social wall as a message this way, but the poll will update in real-time on screen as people vote.

voting method

Step 7: For handling votes from the same user (@user), you can choose from these options :

  • Allow multiple votes from the same @user: Users can vote as many times as they wish on any of the categories. Each vote they submit will increase each category by one vote and their other votes will remain in the other categories.
  • Only count the first vote from an @user: this records only the first vote from each user and blocks them from submitting additional votes
  • Only count the most recent vote from an @user: this allows users users to change their vote by submitting another vote with their new choice. We recommend this approach, as it allows users to change their mind on what they voted for. The original vote they submitted will be backed out, so you’ll see the original category get reduced by one, while the new category increases by one.

how should votes

Step 8: You can optionally weigh votes differently based on the content type. For most events we recommend leaving these at 1 each.

  • How many votes should a post count as: set the value of a regular text post.
  • How many votes should a post with a photo count as: set the value of a post with photo.
  • How many votes should a post with a video count as: set the value of a post with video.

How should we weigh votes

Step 9: Add specific users to exclude from counting on a poll. Choose the content source and enter their username and we’ll ignore any votes from them. This is most useful if you have set the voting method to be by parsing post text.

ignored votes

Step 10: If you want add more users to exclude from vote results click the +Add another link then choose the content source and enter their username.

add another link

Step 11: Enter your poll headline to be displayed on your wall.

headline 2

Step 12: This will be shown near the headline. You can provide the directions on how to participate in the poll.

instructions 2

Step 13:  Select the leader color to represent the category with the highest number of votes, while the non-leader color will be used for the remaining categories with the lower number of votes.

poll colors 2

Step 14: Select the type of poll you prefer the results to be shown as. It can be presented as bar, column, donut, or pie charts.

poll type

Step 15: After filling all the necessary details, click the Save Poll button to save the poll.

save poll

Step 16: Now that you’ve created your poll, the next step is to show it on screen whenever you’re ready for people to see it. Keep in mind that the poll is active based on the dates/times that you provided in the 4th step. Showing it on screen does not make voting active.


Still have questions? Get in touch.