INTRODUCTION
Whether you are hosting a public involvement meeting for an upcoming project or holding a community meeting, Slido is an interactive tool that can help you gather live feedback from stakeholders.
The polling platform can be used for in-person, virtual or hybrid meetings to engage your audience and ask questions in real-time. It can also be integrated into other meeting tools, such as PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, WebEx and more.
Following are some ways you can use Slido for public involvement and community engagement.
SIGN UP FOR SLIDO AND FIND THE APPROPRIATE PLAN
To get started with Slido, you will need to create an account. Enter your first and last name and email address, and set up a password to sign up for your “free forever” Basic account. While this is a good option for testing out the platform, you will likely need a paid plan to get all the features you need.
For instance, the basic account only includes three polls (e.g., individual questions) per event and up to 100 participants. In most cases, you will need more than three questions to collect the information you need at your meeting, especially if you are gathering feedback about multiple topics. It also lacks certain features, such as the ability to create surveys (e.g., groups of questions) or export data, that the paid plans have.
The paid options are Engage, Professional or Enterprise, which cost $17.50-$200 per month when billed annually. In most cases, the Engage or Professional plans will meet your needs.
CREATE YOUR LIVE POLLS AND SURVEYS
Slido is a pretty straightforward platform. Once you have your account set up, click the green “+ Create Slido” button to create your Slido event. Enter the date range you’d like to use (e.g., the date of your event) and name your Slido. Make sure to use a name that is easily identifiable, like “[name of meeting: date],” especially if you plan to use the tool for multiple meetings or events. Click “Create Slido” to start setting up your polls.
ADD YOUR POLL QUESTIONS
Once you create your Slido, you will see an assortment of options, including:
- Multiple choice: Assign pre-defined answers to your question. You can limit the number of responses people can select (e.g., one answer) or allow them to choose multiple options.
- Rating: Use a rating poll to quickly feedback from participants about a specific topic, such as traffic safety in the project zone. You can set the rating scale from 2-10. In addition, you can create a low score label (e.g., not at all important) and a high score label (e.g., extremely important) to provide context.
- Ranking: This format allows you to get a sense of your audiences’ priorities or preferences, as you can ask people to rank items from most important to least important. Assign a set number of options to rank (e.g., select the two most important options) or allow participants to rank all options.
- Open text: Just as it sounds, open text questions allow participants to freely write answers or comments. This could be a good follow-up for a multiple-choice question. For instance, “What other elements of the project are important to you?”
- World cloud: This option allows you to see the most popular answers in an easy way. It is ideal for one-word answers to questions like, “Which neighborhood do you live in?”
- Quiz: A quiz can be a good way to test your participant’s understanding of a topic you just covered. It has a multiple-choice-style format.
You can use multiple question formats within the same Slido event to add variety and capture more meaningful feedback. For example, you can have participants rate the importance of each of your project goals by adding a rating question, and also have them select which design alternative(s) or outcomes they prefer by including a multiple choice question.
Use the poll settings to further format your questions. For instance, this is where you can assign multiple options for the multiple choice questions or set the rating scale from 2-10. You also can add images and descriptions to provide more context to your questions or hide the results so attendees cannot see others’ responses.
SET UP SURVEYS
With Slido, each “poll” (e.g., each question) displays individually. In some cases, however, you may want to group a series of questions together. This can be particularly useful if you have a presentation that is broken up into different topics, and you have a series of questions for each. For example, a public involvement meeting for a new road construction project could require feedback that is specific to each intersection within the project area. You can create a Slido survey to group questions that are specific to each intersection together to help keep participants on track.
Click “Create Survey” instead of the individual question formats to get started. From there, you can name your survey and add the appropriate questions. Multiple choice is the default format, but you can toggle to any of the question formats listed above (except for quizzes). Add as many questions as you’d like and adjust the poll settings as you would for individual questions.
Of note, surveys allow you to require answers from your participants, which can be helpful for getting feedback on your most important questions. This isn’t an all-or-nothing option, meaning you can require answers for some questions and not others within the survey.
You also can group individual questions you already created into a survey, so you don’t need to start over if you decide to change the format. Similarly, you can ungroup questions from the survey if necessary.
USE THE AUDIENCE Q&A FEATURE
You can use the Audience Q&A feature if you’d like to allow two-way communication during your public involvement meeting or community event. This allows audience members to ask questions during your presentation.
Only the Professional and Enterprise plans allow you to moderate these questions, meaning you can review the questions before other participants can see them. They will be visible immediately with the Basic or Engage plans.
If you are strictly looking to share information without a Q&A session, you can disable this feature. Go to “Settings” and click “Features.” Then turn off the audience Q&A.
LAUNCH YOUR LIVE POLL
Even if you set a future start date for your Slido event, you can launch your poll whenever you’d like. Simply click the green play icon to the right of the question or survey to make it live. As mentioned, each survey or poll is displayed individually, which means you can prevent participants from looking ahead.
When you wish to close your poll or survey, simply click the red stop icon hide the question or click the lock icon to stop accepting answers. You can always reopen a poll or survey if needed. You also have the option to hide the results (if you didn’t do this in settings) by clicking the eye icon next to the corresponding poll or survey.
One nice feature of Slido is its ability to let you edit questions on the fly. This could be useful if you notice an error or if you find that something needs to be reworded for clarity.
Slido doesn’t require attendees to create a user account to participate. To invite people to use Slido, you can provide them with a self-generated link, provide them with a QR code that you create from the link or tell them to go to Slido.com and type in the self-generated meeting number. For example, in a video meeting, you could post the link in a chat box for people to click. For an in-person meeting, on the other hand, you can direct people to scan the QR code or go to Slido.com and enter the meeting number from their mobile device.
Participants will only need to join the Slido event once, as long as they keep their browsers open.
You can share access to the controls with others in your organization by inviting them to collaborate. This can be helpful if you’d like someone else to run the polls while you lead the meeting. To do this, go to your event settings and click “Share Access.” Then enter their email to invite them directly, or create a link you can send to multiple people at once.
Of note, collaborators can only access one Slido event at a time. If, for example, you send an invitation to collaborate for a second Slido event and they accept, they will lose access to the first one.
REVIEW RESULTS AND ANALYTICS
Go to the “Analytics” section to view the results. You can do this in real-time or once your event has ended. To show participants the live results, click “Share Analytics” and create a public link. Post it in the chat box during your virtual meeting or visit the link after each set of questions to show the responses during your in-person presentation. You can opt to show engagement, Q&A insights and/or poll insights when you set up the link.
You can also keep the answers visible while the poll is live so they can get a sense of how others are responding.
To view the analytics later, export the data into an Excel file or PDF, or send out the shared analytics link to your team or participants via email. For the former, you can view multiple reports, such as an event summary, overall poll results (e.g., aggregate data) or poll results by individual users.
Use the results of your Slido event to help guide decisions or next steps for your objective.