Poll & Vote

Our Poll & Vote feature allows you to run Text-2-Vote campaigns using Keywords. As long as you have an active Keyword in your account, you can create a poll in a few quick steps. Voting is as simple as texting ‘PollKeyword Choice’ to your short code phone number. If you had the Keyword MYVOTE and you wanted to ask people what color was the best - red, green or blue – your clients would text in entries like ‘MyVote Blue’ or 'MyVote Red'.

Please note: The poll must be advertised to your contacts so they know how to vote or you can send them a text to tell them how they can text in their vote.

The first thing you’ll do is name your poll, choose an end date (you can leave your poll open-ended if you like), and set your choices.

Under Campaigns, go to Poll & Vote. Then select Create New Poll.

Then choose the Keyword you wish to use for your voting campaign. Your voting recipients will be texting in this keyword along with their voting choice.

Now that you have chosen the keyword to use for your poll, connect the poll to a group. This group will be the contact list that will be connected to your poll where their votes will accumulate.

Then, name your poll and list out the five choices that the voters will be able to text in.

Note: If you need more than five choices, create a text with choices connected to a sub-keyword instead.

The poll module will automatically setup a Sub-Keyword for each choice in your poll. Then choose when you would like the poll to end. Or, you can leave this field empty if you want to keep the poll running.

Lastly, create your auto-reply message that recipients will receive when they have successfully texted in their votes.

Other options include texting the winning result to all voters and allowing multiple votes per person. Once you start your poll you can watch the votes in real time. When the poll is over you can export the results as a CSV. 

Common Questions:

What if I don’t have any Keywords?

You can setup a new Keyword to use with your poll.

What happens to my Keyword settings if I use an existing Keyword for my poll?

Those settings are turned off for the duration of the poll. Polling relies on a Keyword and Sub-Keywords, so features like send-from-phone, API and preexisting sub-Keywords must be disabled.

If someone texts a vote into my poll who isn’t a contact, will they be added to my list?

Yes – and when you setup your poll you can choose the group for poll entry opt-ins.