Create votes and polls online
Votes and polls are generally used to support decision-making and can be run as short online surveys, often with just one question. Online voting is therefore not intended to explore complex opinions in depth. Instead, it is designed to collect a clear response to a question from as many participants as possible, for example to identify a majority or calculate an average. A common voting format offers the response options “Yes”, “No” and “Abstain”. Elections are a familiar example of voting.
Votes are often used to determine the preference of a majority, but they can also be used for entertainment or to gather information. On a company website, an online vote can cover current, context-specific or purely entertaining questions, for example:
- rating a film
- choosing a preferred canteen meal
- selecting a preferred date or period
- questions about the features or design of your own website
Since the coronavirus pandemic at the latest, online voting and elections have become an established alternative to in-person events. They allow voting to take place regardless of location and can be particularly useful when meeting in person is not possible or would involve unnecessary effort.
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What are online votes suitable for?
Online voting is well suited to identifying trends or determining majority preferences. It allows decisions to be made or tendencies to be identified quickly without lengthy discussions, while still taking participants’ views into account. Online votes are quick to create, easy to run and can be used in many different ways.
You can use online voting to entertain current or prospective customers, ask them to rate a new product or product design, or improve your website or online shop using their feedback. Voting gives you direct feedback from customers, participants or your own employees. In return, they have an opportunity to express their views and compare them with those of others.
Associations can also conduct elections and votes online. Since the coronavirus pandemic at the latest, digital voting and elections have become considerably more common and continue to be used to support location-independent decision-making. Regular association elections, for example, can take place without everyone being physically present. Whether an amendment to the association’s articles is required should be checked in advance. Further information on secure online elections is available from LamaPoll.
Questionnaire templates for online surveys, anonymous and non-anonymous votes, opinion surveys and digital elections are available on our templates page.
What should you consider when creating an online vote?
Keep it short: online votes usually consist of one or just a few questions with only a small number of response options. Participation should take as little time as possible. That also means using an online tool with a design optimised for mobile devices. Avoid voting tools that make participants tap tiny radio buttons, for example. The tool should also allow you to embed the vote on your own company website. Participants may also appreciate features such as response options that display live results. A flexible voting tool should support this.
Online voting with live results: Our Helpdesk explains the available options and how to run online votes with live results.
Create an online vote with the LamaPoll survey tool
Our survey tool lets you create and run custom online votes and polls in a format and design that suit your needs. With LamaPoll, you can ask people to vote on images, dates or any topic you choose. You can embed the vote on your own website via iframe so that it appears as part of the site itself. You can also duplicate and adapt your online votes, making it easy to run further votes regularly without starting from scratch. Our servers are designed to handle large numbers of participants, so we can also provide greater stability than comparable providers for regular or large-scale online voting.
Embedding a vote on your own website is straightforward. Whether you use a pop-up or iframe, Joomla or WordPress, LamaPoll provides the code and you simply add it to your site.
All you need to get started is an email address and a password.
Examples and questionnaires for online voting
Familiar examples of online voting include choosing a “Goal of the Month” or “Youth Word of the Year”. Audience awards are also often decided by online vote. Companies can use online voting in many ways: purely for entertainment, to identify trends, to help choose dates, or to support decisions during product development. Before launching new product packaging, for example, a marketing or development team could put several colour variants to a vote to find out which combinations are currently preferred. Voting can also give customers or participants a sense that they have a say, while in other cases it may simply be entertaining.
Examples of topics for online votes
Questions might cover:
- preferred canteen meals
- product design
- choosing a date
- event ratings
- missing or preferred communication channels
- leisure activities
- choosing a name
- holiday planning or company outings
You can also use our questionnaire templates for online voting as a starting point. Copy a template to your LamaPoll account with one click and adapt it to your voting topic.
As an umbrella association in Germany, we hold an annual public vote. For the 2023 vote, we chose LamaPoll as our provider. As a non-profit organisation, we were able to purchase a discounted plan. Because we could not estimate participation in the first year, LamaPoll was flexible and found a fair solution even when participation was unexpectedly high. Contact with the support and sales team was pleasant and competent, and LamaPoll also accommodated our special requests. Creating the online vote was easy and met our technical requirements without any problems. The vote itself ran smoothly and without technical issues. We received positive feedback from participants and had a dropout rate of only 1.2%. Another argument was the server location in Germany and GDPR compliance. We are very satisfied with the solution and will use LamaPoll again.
