What types of polls and activities can you run with Poll Everywhere?

Poll Everywhere supports a range of live activities: multiple-choice and bar chart polls, word clouds, open-ended responses, Q&A with upvoting, Likert scales, competitions with leaderboards, attendance check-in, clickable image questions, and radar charts. You can embed them directly into PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, PDFs, and other presentation formats, and participants respond from their own devices without downloading anything. The right choice depends on whether you want to measure a distribution, collect free text, rank ideas, or track who showed up.

Choice and distribution polls

Use these when you need a countable answer per person and want the audience to see the shape of the group.

• Bar charts — Ask a question with set answer choices; bars grow in real time as responses arrive. Example from the site: "Which onboarding format works best?" with 1,248 responses split across interactive workshop, self-paced modules, mentor shadowing, and docs deep-dive.
• Donut chart — Same idea as a bar chart but shows share of total. The site's example asks "Where do you work best?" with 1,532 votes across hybrid, fully remote, and in office.
• Clickable image — Participants click a spot on an image. The site's example asks respondents to "click where the tree is" and reports correct answers, which makes it useful for labeling, anatomy, maps, or any spatial question.

Open-ended and text-based activities

Use these when the value is in the words people choose, not in a preset list.

• Word clouds — Ask for a single word and watch the cloud build. The site's example: "Describe today's session in one word," with 312 responses including engaging, clear, fast-paced, practical, and fun.
• Open-ended responses — Free text answers that you can display or review. The site's opening example asks "In one word, where is our industry heading?" and shows 124 responding with terms like forward, digital, connected, and automated.

Q&A with upvoting

Use this for panels, all-hands, and any session where the audience has questions but you can't take them all.

• Participants submit questions and upvote others.
• Upvotes reorder the queue live, so the most-wanted questions rise to the top.
• The site's example shows 486 responses, 18 questions in queue, and one question marked "ANSWERING NOW" with 25 upvotes.

This is the format to pick when the bottleneck is deciding which question to answer next, not collecting questions.

Rating and comparison scales

• Likert scale — Agreement or rating statements. The site's example: "The training prepared me for my role," 897 responses, average 4.1 / 5 with 72% agree or higher.
• Radar chart — Compare multiple dimensions at once. The site's example rates a workshop across clarity, pace, depth, energy, and relevance, and shows the change versus the last session (e.g., clarity +12%).

Use radar charts when you want a profile rather than a single score, and Likert scales when you want one number you can track over time.

Competitions and leaderboards

• Competitions — Point-based rounds with a live leaderboard. The site's example shows a product trivia round with ranked participants, point totals, and a "+500 speed bonus," plus a countdown to the next question.
• Leaderboard — Ranks respondents by points as answers come in.

This format works for training, onboarding, and review sessions where you want sustained attention rather than a single snapshot.

Attendance and check-in

• Attendance — Participants check in with a code or by scanning. The site's example shows "37 of 38 checked in" and a code entry screen.

Use this at the start of a class or session when you need a record of who was present.

How to choose

Practical notes

• Participants join via a link or code (the site shows the pattern PollEv.com/andrew) and respond on their own devices; no download is required for them.
• Responses update in real time, so the display changes as people answer.
• Polls embed into existing presentation tools rather than requiring a separate deck, which matters if you present from PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, or a PDF.
• The site states it is trusted by 82% of the Fortune 500 and 91% of R1 universities, and lists enterprise-grade data protection as a feature — relevant if you need to justify the tool internally.

For pricing and plan limits, check the Pricing page linked from the site, since the available material does not specify costs or tier restrictions.