How to use Polls on Zoom

In March, I wrote a post for this blog on how to use Zoom. Since Covid-19 still has us all stuck at home, why not learn more about Zoom?  In this blog post, I will show you how to use Zoom’s polling feature.

 

Before the meeting.

First, sign into the Zoom website—not the client.*

Next, you need to check your account settings to make sure polls are enabled. Go to the settings page

Then scroll down to polling and, if it’s not on, turn it on.

With polling enabled, we can then create a meeting, here I have already created a meeting called “Learning about polls.”

Next, click into that meeting’s page—I’ll click on the blue text “Learning about polls.”

Once you are on the new meeting page, scroll to the bottom and you will see a box that informs you “You have not created any poll yet.” Adjacent to this message hit the add button.

This launches the “Add a Poll” dialog box.

Here we can create the poll questions. From this box, you will enter a title for your poll, choose whether participants will answer the poll anonymously (i.e. the system will not collect the participant’s answers), and enter poll questions. This poll contains two questions. One question is set to a single choice and the other to multiple choice. Once you’re done entering questions, hit save. You can create multiple polls for use within a single meeting.

In preparation for my meeting, I created three polls using the various settings available in the Zoom poll creation tool. Next up, we’ll use these polls within a zoom meeting.

During the Meeting

To help with this meeting I enlisted the aid of several law librarians.** The purpose of the meeting was to take some trivial polls and to get some photos to use in this blog post; we accomplished all of our goals.***

As soon as everyone logged in to the zoom, I launched the polls by selecting them from the polling button which appears when you hover over the Zoom window.

Then after everyone responded to each poll, I shared the results.  The second question on the first poll is a multiple-choice so participants were able to select as many answers as they wanted. Also note, as host, I could not respond to the polls.

   

After the Meeting

Zoom allows you to later download poll results. Here’s how:

Log into your zoom account, then go to Reports and select Meeting.

Next select Poll Report and adjust the date range to show the meeting for which you want the poll reports.

After that, check the box for your meeting and hit Generate. Doing so will bring you to the Report Queue from which you can download your poll results.

Zoom gives poll results in a CSV file format. Here is a peek at my poll results after I adjusted the width of the columns. We can tell the results between the first poll and the second. Although all meeting attendees had identified themselves in some way, my poll results unexpectedly list many attendees as Guest. The second poll remained completely anonymous.

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* Thanks to Nicole Dyszlewski for pointing this out.
** Thanks to Mandy Lee, Mike Muehe, Rachel Weiss, and again Nicole Dyszlewski.
*** Thanks to Mandy Lee for the screenshots.