You’ve created a survey, you’ve set up your survey options, and now you’re headlong into creating a series of multiple choice questions that you composed in a text editor.

Click on the multiple choice question type to add it to the bottom of your list of survey elements.

Click on the Plain Editor button. The individual answer options will change into a text box, into which you can copy and paste your answer options, instead of typing them in individually. Here we’ve copied all the potential newsletter content options and pasted them into the Plain Editor:

Click on the Visual Editor button or the Plain Editor button to toggle back and forth between the two views to add individual answer options or paste in more answer options in bulk:

When you’ve finished adding answer options, be sure to click on the Done button for your changes to take effect:

You can create learn more about Polldaddy, or sign up for a free account to create your own survey.

To get started, click on the big blue, Create a New button and select Survey:

You’ll want to give your survey a name, and select some survey options first, before you’re ready to start adding elements to your survey. To add any element, you can click and drag it to the survey creation area, or click on the element once to make it appear in the survey. New elements are always added to the bottom of your set of questions, though you can reorder them as you see fit.

Type in your free text question. Here, we want to capture some qualitative information on how the Beet Marketing Board can better serve its customers and so we’ve asked participants to describe how they think we can better serve their needs. You can check the include a note check box on the free text options, on the right hand side of the question editor to add some text to guide participants on the information that you’re looking for, or offer a bit of encouragement:

Other free text question options include making the question mandatory, meaning that the participant must answer the question to complete the survey. You can also change the the size of the text entry box. You can choose from among small, medium, or large textbox sizes. Additionally, you can select the type of free text field you’d like, be it single line, multi-line, or a password input.

Once you’ve got your question set up and you’ve selected your options, click on the Done button to save your work:

Here’s what a sample free text question looks like as part of a survey, with the include a note option set, and a large text input size. The Graphite survey style is shown here:

You can create learn more about Polldaddy, or sign up for a free account to create your own survey.

First, click on the big blue, Create a New button and select Survey:

Once you’ve named your survey, and selected some survey options, you’re ready to start adding elements to your survey. To add any element, you can click and drag it to the survey creation area, or click on the element once, and it will appear in the survey creation area. New elements are always added to the bottom of your set of questions, though you can reorder them as you see fit.

You can type in the name of your survey, or the name of your company or organization into the page header, or any other text as you see fit. You can choose to use the page header element as a footer, as well. For a footer, you might want to add your company’s slogan or the date, as examples. Page header elements are a great way to add your company’s logo into a survey.

Checking the include a note check box on the right side of the page header element allows you to add some additional text beneath the page heading type, in slightly smaller type. You can use the note to add your company slogan, or a sub-heading to your page header element.

Once you’ve got your text entered, click on the Done button to finalize your edits:

Here’s how a page header element looks at the top of a sample survey. The Surveymattic style is shown here:

You can create learn more about Polldaddy, or sign up for a free account to create your own survey.

First, you’ll want to create a poll.

Once you’re ready to embed your poll, hover over the title of it in your Polldaddy.com dashboard and click on Share:

On the Share popup, choose WordPress. Copy the WordPress shortcode we supply:

Paste the shortcode into a new post on your WordPress site. Now here’s the trick to ensure your poll appears as a slider popup when a visitor clicks on the title of the post. Be sure to type in type="slider" within the shortcode, like so:

Publish your WordPress.com post. Now, when you click on the post’s title, you’ll see the slider popup slip smoothly into view:

You can learn more about Polldaddy, or get your hands dirty and sign up for a free account. You can get started creating polls, surveys, quizzes, and ratings in minutes.

For WordPress.com site owners, we have a short code that you can copy and paste into a new post, or into the sidebar of your site, using a text widget. WordPress.org site owners can download the Polldaddy plugin and install it to use the WordPress short code. If you’re not on WordPress, you can use our JavaScript embed code to place a poll on your site.

First, you’ll want to create a poll.

Once you’ve got your poll set up, you’re ready to embed it into your website. To get the JavaScript embed code, hover over the title of your poll in your Polldaddy.com dashboard and click on Share:

On the Share popup, select JavaScript:

There are three JavaScript embed types: Inline, Results, and Slider Popup.

Embedding polls inline in your website

To embed a poll in the body of your webpage, select Inline. Copy the JavaScript we supply, and paste it into a new post or into the location on your website where you would like the poll to appear:

Here’s how your poll will look. (This poll is shown with basic styling.)

Embedding poll results only

You can choose to embed only your poll’s results into your website. To get the JavaScript code, hover over the title of your poll in your dashboard and click on Share. On the Share popup, select JavaScript. Then, on the right-hand side of the Share popup, select Results:

Copy the JavaScript code we supply, and then paste it into the location where you’d like to see you poll’s results on your website. Here’s a sample of what the poll’s results will look like:

Embedding the poll as a slider popup

You can choose to have your poll slide into view from the bottom, right-hand side of the screen. To get the JavaScript code, hover over the title of your poll in your dashboard and click on Share. On the Share popup, select JavaScript. Then, on the right-hand side of the Share popup, select Slider Popup:

Here’s a sample of what your poll will look like after it has slid into view:

If you’d like to get started creating polls for your site, you can sign up for a free account. Here’s a guide on how to create a poll using Polldaddy.com

Let’s use this simple cookie poll as an example. Here’s what an active, open poll looks like when it’s embedded in your site. (Here’s how to create your own poll, for extra credit.)

If you choose to close the poll, site visitors will see only the poll’s results, in the poll’s container:

To close a poll, you can click on the green circle next to its title in your Polldaddy.com dashboard. The green circle (which denotes an open poll) will change into a red circle with a line through it, signifying that your poll is closed:

You can choose to show only the results in a slightly different format. To embed the poll’s results only, hover over the title of the poll in your dashboard and click on Share:

On the Share popup, choose Results. Copy the JavaScript code, and paste it into a new post on your website. Here’s how the results will look as seen in a new post on your site:

To get started creating polls on your site, create a free Polldaddy.com account.

The custom style editor now looks a whole lot nicer with the addition of the ACE editor.

Aside from the obvious syntax highlighting in the screenshot above it also has other ease of use features such as smart indentation, highlighting of matching parentheses and keyboard shortcuts.

New reports have been added to the surveys. Dig into the detailed reports for the text or multiple choice surveys questions and you’ll see them. There are three ways of looking at the detailed reports now.

• All Answers
• Popular Answers
• Popular Words

“All Answers” is what you would expect. All the answers for this particular question, listed in the order they were received.

“Popular Answers” orders the answers by the frequency they appear in the result set. It matches complete answers including spaces.

“Popular Words” is a word cloud. It displays a cloud of words with the most frequently seen words larger than the rarer ones. Hover over a word to see how many times that words appears in the results.

The reports are available to all users, free and paid and I hope they make it easier to analyse your data. The editor should make it easier to edit your custom styles but if you have any queries don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or contact support through your dashboard.

Let’s say you’re having participants complete a survey to gather some information for a new company you’re starting. At the end of the survey, you want to invite people to sign up to receive updates and information about your new company. Here’s how to set up the redirect to your signup page.

First, you’ll want to create a survey.

Once you’ve got your questions set up, hover over the title of your survey in your dashboard and click on Edit:

Scroll down to the middle of the survey settings screen and under Finish Options, select the radio button next to Redirect to URL. A text box will be revealed. Type in the URL of the your signup page:

To save your changes, be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the blue Save Settings button:

That’s all there is to it! Now, when participants complete your survey they’ll be redirected to your signup page automatically after the click on the Finish Survey button.

To get started, login to your Polldaddy dashboard. Click on the big blue, Create a new… dropdown and select Poll:

Name the poll, enter answer options

Now let’s name the poll and enter the answer options. To make a poll public, check the Make poll public checkbox. Note that all polls created in free accounts are public by default. Public polls are published on the Polldaddy Community site and anyone on the internet can see and participate in them. Private polls are available to paid accounts only. Private polls do not appear on the Community Site.

By default, there are five answer options. You can choose to add additional options by clicking on the Add New Answer button:

By default, possible answers appear in the order in which you entered them. We want to shake things up, so we’ve checked the Randomize answer order checkbox to serve the answer options in random order for each visitor. Finally, we’re going to allow participants to submit their own answer, if they can’t find their favorite cookie on our list. This adds an Other option with a textbox to the end of the list of answer options that participants can use to type in their own answer.

Now that you’ve got your poll question and answer options all set, scroll down the page to choose a style for the poll. There’s several nifty styles to choose from. Here’s just a few:

Next, choose a width for your poll widget:

Poll options

There are several final options you can select before you create your poll:

• Closing polls automatically
• Adding a poll language pack to customize default English text and phrases such as button text, or have them appear in a different language
• Showing / hiding results
• Blocking repeat voters
• Allowing comments
• Allowing sharing

Once you’ve selected final options, be sure to click on the blue Create Poll button:

Publishing your poll

We offer several different ways for you to publish your poll. You can:

• Embed your poll on your website
• Embed your poll on your WordPress.com site
• Embed your poll on your WordPress.org site
• Embed your poll on your Tumblr site
• Embed your poll on your Posterous site
• Embed your poll on your MySpace site
• Embed your poll on your NING site
• Post a link to your poll on Twitter
• Copy a direct link to the poll’s community site page to share with others
• Send out your poll via email

Facebook polls

Learn more about how to create and manage polls on Facebook using the Polldaddy Polls Facebook Application.

Extra credit

You may also be interested in:

• How to embed a poll in my WordPress.com sidebar

Got time for a quick poll?

Here are the steps to setting up a survey share. The steps are identical for sharing quiz reports with others.

First, hover over the title of your survey in your dashboard and click on Reports.

Next, click on Data:

On the right-hand side of the following screen, under Data Options, click on Share your reports:

The survey share popup will appear. Click on create one:

Next, enter the email address of the person with whom you’d like to share the report. You can choose to enter a password of your choice, or you can generate a random password. By default, the share will be able to access all the survey’s reports, including the full results, the locations report, the full details of each question’s results, the participants report, and the devices report. Uncheck the boxes next to the reports you do not want to share. You can also choose whether or not to allow your share to export results out of Polldaddy.com via CSV, Excel, Google Docs, PDF, and/or XML.

When you’re finished making your selections, click on the blue Confirm button on the bottom, right-hand side of the popup. You’ll be asked to review the details of your share. If you’ve made a mistake, you can correct it by clicking on the Edit this Share button on the top, right-hand corner of the popup. If the details are correct, click on the blue button that says Email Above Access to User:

Your share will receive an email with the link to the survey report, as well as the password needed to access the report.

Deleting a share

Here’s how to delete a survey share.

First, hover over the title of your survey in your dashboard and click on Reports.

Next, click on Data:

On the right-hand side of the following screen, under Data Options, click on Share your reports:

On the Share popup, click on Delete next to the share you wish to delete. This will prevent your share from accessing any survey reports: