How to Poll With Cell Phones

Polling with cell phones via texting can be a fast and useful way to gather information.

Cell phones can become a quick and easy way to do polling. Texting poll questions allows a person to answer the question at their convenience. It also provides the pollster a sent verification. Text polling can be used with non random populations. Non random populations can come in handy when trying to poll specialized professions or just finding out important information from a company's client list.

Things You'll Need

• Cell phone

Instructions

1. 

   Obtaining a list of recipient phone numbers is the first task to accomplish.

   Obtain a list of recipients the user wants to poll. Do this either by gathering colleagues' cell phone numbers or through using a company's list of clients. When using colleagues, the user can expand their poll population by asking for additional cell phone numbers of friends.

2. 

   Make sure the polling questions and answers requested are clear to the recipients.

   Send a text with the polling information to the list of recipients. Make sure to include clear directions as to what you want the recipients to text back to you. There are some websites, such as Polls Boutique, that allow a person to construct clear directions and options from which the polled people choose.

3. 

   Some polling results can be converted to graph form, which can give a nice picture of data trends.

   Tabulate the responses the recipients send back. Have a spreadsheet or piece of paper ready to put a check in the appropriate response column; this helps condense the responses and make the data more easier to work with. Once the responses have been recorded, delete the text messages from the phone so the memory doesn't become full.

References

• Poll Everywhere: Text Polling
• Polls Boutique: Create your own poll