4 - Running the polling session

Note: This article applies to the "legacy" version of polling, which is deprecated. Please use the new live session polling. More information.

Once you've finished creating your poll, you can try running the poll to see how it works.

The speaker will typically introduce a poll, and may also be controlling the flow of questions via the Live view controls, keyboard arrows, or even better: a standard clicker such as those used for controlling presentations.

To control a poll, the speaker needs to have access to the Live view. You can give your speaker direct access to the Live view by sharing a permalink with them. This is created using the Permalink button in the Polling sessions tab.

To launch the poll, simply click on the Live view button. From there either you or the speaker can take control of the poll and start it. When the poll starts, app users will receive a notification prompting them to join the poll.

In this article we'll explain in detail how to launch a poll and control the flow of questions.

Running the poll

Polls are run via the Live view. The Live view is the screen that app users will see as the poll takes place, once the poll is launched. It is also where the the flow of questions can be controlled, using a set of buttons in the bottom left corner, explained below:

	Close the poll
	Enter or exit full screen
	Restart a question
	Move to the next question, or start countdown/open voting for current question
	Go to the previous question

Note: You can also use the keyboard arrows or space bar to control the poll. Or, even better, you can use standard clickers to control the poll.

Follow the below steps to launch and run a poll:

1. Go to the Polling sessions tab, where you'll see a list of all the polling sessions in the workspace:
2. Open the Live view of the poll you wish to launch, by clicking on the Launch button. The below screen is displayed as you have not yet started the poll. 
   Opening the Live view does not actually launch the poll, and the app users will not have received a notification to join the poll.
   
   
   Note: As mentioned above, this is also where you can create a permalink to give your speaker access to the Live screen so they can directly control the poll themselves.
   
   
3. Start the poll by using the  button in the Live screen. This will display the poll's first question and send a notification to the app users for them to join the poll:
   
   
   Note: At this point app users can see the first question, but can't yet answer it as you have not yet opened the question for voting.
   
   
4. Click on the  button again to display the first question's options, that app users will be able to choose from:
   
   Note: At this point app users can see the options they can choose from to answer the question, but still can't answer it as you have not yet opened the question for voting (started the count down).
   
   
5. Click on the  button again to start the countdown and open voting for the question:
   Here, in the screenshot we can see that the countdown is down to 5 seconds (at the bottom of the screen) and that one app user has voted 5 stars.
   The Live screen will display the votes in real time, and when the countdown is over you can click  again to display the final results.

Note: During a poll, app users can still vote once the timer has run out. We recommend that speakers wait for a short period (approx 5 seconds) after the count down ends, to ensure all app users have voted, before moving on to display the results.

Once you've displayed the votes for the first question to the audience, you can either move on to the next question using  and follow the same steps as above, or you can restart the question by clicking the  button.

At any time you can move forward or backwards from one question to another using the  or buttons. When you have reached the end of the poll, the configurable Goodby message is displayed.

You can click on the  button to close the poll.

NEXT STEP
Once you've run your poll and collected all your participants, find out how to export the poll results.