From Sampler to Sower

polleverywhere.com SMS Audience Response System

We’ve introduced you to our new series at Water’s Edge called “You Decide.”  The essence of this series is the opportunity for students to text in questions and topics for us to cover in our teaching.  To facilitate this, we’re using the SMS poll service from polleverywhere.com.

It seems really simple from the audience’s viewpoint.  At the start of each service we invite students to text in any questions they’d like us to address.  “Simply text ‘youdecide’ and your question to 99503,” I say, and questions start rolling in.  “Have Twitter? Just tweet an @reply to @poll with ‘youdecide’ and your question.  And if you don’t have a cell phone, you can always go to our website, watersedgeyouth.com and follow the link to submit a question.”

During the week, students can check the live text wall at watersedgeyouth.com and see what questions come in.  As questions are submitted, we moderate the answers to make sure inappropriate messages don’t get posted to the wall of our website.

And all of it is made possible by polleverywhere.com.

Ask Anything

Polleverywhere.com is a SMS voting and audience response system.  A subscription allows you to ask as many questions as you want in a month, and results can be posted to your website or even sent live to your video projector in the room.

Multiple Choice Poll

Your question can be a multiple choice poll where participants send a keyword or number to 99503 to cast their vote for one option or another.  (See the image on the right for a detail.  To vote for “dam : river” (the ‘correct’ answer, btw) all a student would have to do is send the code 26157 to 99503.)

Or you can ask an open ended question (like “What would you like us to address at the next Water’s Edge?”) in which participants include a keyword or number at the beginning of their text message, and then use the rest of the message to send in their answer.

Customizable Subscription Plans

Subscription plans run from free (maximum 30 responses per poll) to $1,400 per month (20,000 responses per poll).  Each subscription level provides additional features.

For $15 per month you accept up to 50 responses per poll, and you can track users across multiple polls to see how they answer multiple polls.  Make one of the polls an open-ended question that asks their name, and you can identify what responses come from what participants.

For $65 per month you can accept up to 250 responses per poll, two users can create polls, and live response moderation is enabled so you can approve responses before they get posted to your live response wall.  Finally, the $65 per month plan allows you to create custom keywords that add a level of usability and professionalism to your poll.  (You can say use an easy to remember word like “youdecide” rather than a hard to remember number to identify your poll.)

Each upgrade in plan from there includes the same features, and accepts additional responses and users per plan.

One Tool, Multiple Uses

We’re obviously using Poll Everywhere to accept questions and topics for our You Decide series.  We’re also using it to enable students to ask questions or make comments during the teaching by sending a text message to an open ended poll.  I have my laptop up front with me and see questions and comments come in as students respond.  That way I can address questions without questions interrupting the flow of the teaching.  (Although we also have a question and comment time during the lesson for students who don’t have a cell phone.)

We’ve also used Poll Everywhere in the past for games.  The poll pictured above came from a trivia game in which we pitted a contestant against the combined intelligence of the audience.  We threw a analogy from SAT practice tests up on the video screen and had the contestant select their answer and write it down in advance.  Then we opened the poll to the audience.  If the student got the answer right and the audience got it wrong, they won a prize.

(When we played this at Water’s Edge, we enabled multiple responses per poll, so students who didn’t have a cell phone could borrow a friends to participate.  Of course, a select few students found it funny to spam the poll with multiple entries of the wrong answer, which not only skewed the results but also froze up the poll once we hit our maximum response limit.  Needless to say, next time we try this we’ll disable multiple responses.)

We’re also planning on using it the next time we play “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” for the “poll the audience” lifeline.

Have you used Poll Everywhere in Your Ministry?

We’re always looking for new ways to use tools like these.  Maybe you’ve done something creative with Poll Everywhere in your ministry.  Sound off in the comments and share your ideas.