Using Polls

This article explains how to send a poll and follow the responses as they come in. Administrators and Dispatchers can send polls. An Administrator must create a poll before you can send it. To learn how, go to Configuring polls.

Step 1

From the dashboard, select Send a Notification

Step 2

Select your notification and poll recipients.

Step 3

On the Compose Notification screen, enter your message.

In the Poll section, select Add a Poll and choose your poll. The Duration field fills in with the closing time set when the poll was created. Select Duration to make it longer or shorter for this notification, or to choose Until filled/closed. Changing it here affects only this notification.

In Delivery Method, choose how to send your notification. You can choose both.

Push Message: Sends a push notification (an alert in the Connect Rocket mobile app). If a contact has no app or the push doesn’t arrive, Connect Rocket sends a text message instead. Connect Rocket also sends an email to contacts who have an email address in their contact profile.
Text-to-Voice Call: Calls the contact’s mobile phone or landline.

Select SEND NOTIFICATION. Your poll is added to the end of your notification.

Text-to-Voice calls are not the preferred way to send a poll. They read the question and every answer aloud, and recipients respond using their telephone keypad. With a large poll, this can take a long time to listen to. Where possible, use Push Message.

Step 4 - Watch the responses come in

After you send your notification, you return to the dashboard. Your poll appears under the Polls tab, with the most recent poll at the top. The counts update in real time as people respond, and the poll shows how long is left before it closes, for example “Closes in about an hour.”

If an answer has a required number of responses, it shows Filled when it reaches that number, and the ring around its count closes. If an answer needs more than one response, the ring shows progress along the way. To learn more, go to Setting required responses for poll answers. Select EXPORT to download the responses, or CLOSE POLL to close the poll early.

Step 5

Select any answer, Waiting for response, or Off Duty when sent to see the contacts by name. From there, you can start a conference call or send a notification to the people in that group.

Understanding the default poll categories

Every poll includes two default categories in addition to the answers you created. Each contact is either On Duty or Off Duty. To learn more, go to What is Duty Manager?

Waiting for response: Contacts who are On Duty and haven’t responded yet. Everyone starts here when you send the poll. The count goes down as people respond and move to an answer.

Off Duty when sent: Contacts who were Off Duty when you sent the poll. They don’t receive a text message, call, email, or push notification. The notification and poll appear silently in the app when they next open it.