Zoom has become an essential tool for remote meetings, webinars, and events. One great way to engage your participants on Zoom is through interactive polls. Polls allow you to gauge opinions, gather feedback, break up your presentation, and make your sessions more interactive.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating and using polls in Zoom, including:
Table of Contents
Benefits of Using Polls in Zoom
There are many benefits to using polls in your Zoom sessions:
- Increase Engagement: Polls require participants to actively respond, keeping them focused and involved.
- Gather Feedback: Get participants’ opinions and perspectives on various topics through multiple-choice or open-ended polls.
- Break Up Presentations: Insert quick polls to add variety and interactivity to long presentations.
- Test Knowledge: Give short quizzes to assess how well your participants understand the material.
- Make Decisions: Use polls to democratically make choices as a group.
How to Create a Poll in Zoom
Creating polls in Zoom only takes a few clicks. Here are the steps:
- Start or join a Zoom meeting as the host.
- Click on the “Polls” icon in the toolbar.
- Click “Add” to create a new poll.
- Enter your poll question and answer options.
- Customize additional poll settings like making it anonymous, allowing multiple answers, etc.
- Click “Save” to add the poll to your meeting.
Tip: Create your polls in advance or add them during the session. You can save polls to reuse them in future meetings too.
Launching Zoom Polls
Once you’ve created polls, launching them for your participants is simple:
- Click “Polls” in the Zoom toolbar.
- Hover over the poll you want to launch and click “Launch Polling”.
- The poll will now open for participants to answer.
- Give your participants time to respond, then click “End Polling” to close the poll.
- View poll results by clicking “Share Results”.
Tip: Launch multiple polls throughout your meeting to keep engagement high.
Zoom Poll Settings and Options
Zoom polls provide extensive customization so you can tailor them as needed:
- Anonymous vs Identified: Choose whether participant names are shown with their responses.
- Single vs Multiple Answers: Allow participants to select one or multiple poll answers.
- Time Limit: Set a time limit for participants to respond to the poll.
- Correct Answer: Mark one poll answer as the “correct” choice for a graded quiz.
- Custom Types: Create ranking, rating, or open response polls.
Utilize these options when creating polls to match the goals of your specific session.
Interactive Ways to Use Polls
Beyond basic multiple choice, there are many creative ways to leverage Zoom polls:
- Icebreaker polls: Fun questions to open meetings and build culture.
- Pulse checks: Quick polls to gauge participants opinions and energy levels.
- Trivia quizzes: Short multiple choice questions to engage and educate.
- Feedback surveys: Gather participant perspectives on various topics.
- Decision making: Have participants vote democratically on key choices.
- Knowledge checks: Test how well participants understand the information.
Get creative with polls tailored to your unique context!
Best Practices for Zoom Polls
Follow these best practices when running polls in Zoom:
- Give clear instructions on how and when to respond.
- Read the poll question and all answers out loud.
- Repeat or rephrase any unclear questions.
- Give enough time for participants to respond (30 seconds minimum).
- Share and discuss the results after closing the poll.
- Link the poll topic back to the wider discussion.
By keeping your polls organized, easy to understand, and integrated into the overall session, you will maximize engagement and participation.
Zoom Poll Limitations
While extremely useful, Zoom polls do have some limitations to be aware of:
- Limited to 25 polls per meeting.
- Anonymous polls only collect limited demographic data.
- Can’t prevent participants from voting multiple times.
- No detailed reporting on individual responses.
If you need advanced surveys, consider using a dedicated tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform which integrate with Zoom.
For most basic purposes though, Zoom’s built-in polling works great!
Summary and Next Steps
Interactive polls provide an excellent way to boost engagement in your Zoom sessions. They only take minutes to create, and leveraging different poll types and options can make your meetings more dynamic.
As the next step, test out polls in your next Zoom meeting! Some initial ideas:
- Icebreaker poll for attendees to share fun facts
- Pulse check on energy levels mid-session
- Quick trivia quiz to recap important points
Be creative and don’t be afraid to experiment! Polls bring variety into virtual sessions, leading to more interaction, participation, and fun.
