Meeting Polls

YouCanBookMe's polling feature allows you to quickly and easily find a time for a group of people to meet.

Whether you're planning a quarterly Executive Team meeting, a cross-department workshop to kick off a new project, or a night out to celebrate your latest win, Meeting Polls are quick to set up and super easy for participants to respond.

Polls are available on the Free, Individual, Professional and Team plans.

Here's how it works:

Create a Poll

Anyone with one of the above YouCanBookMe account plans can create a poll. You will see it at the top of your account navigation.

Select Create New Poll to get started.

You'll be able to name your poll, set the length of the meeting and add a location. Click directly on the calendar to select the times and dates you want to offer as options. Click on it again to remove that time slot as an option.

To skip ahead to dates in the future, click on the date at the top left corner of the calendar to see a month view.

The day that the calendar week begins is determined by your location, not your time zone. For example, in the US and Canada, the first day will be Sunday. In many parts of Europe, the first day will be Monday. You can change this by scrolling to the bottom of the account page and changing your language preference.

You can enter up to 50 time slots for participants to choose from.

Under Advanced, you can set the following:

Require participant emails: By default, participants are required to include their email when they respond to a poll. You can turn this off so people can respond without giving an email. Please note: participants who don't add their email will not be able to update their response nor receive an invitation to the event.
Private poll: By default, polls are set to "Public", which means anyone with the link can respond to it. If you want to lock down who can respond, toggle this setting on to make it a Private poll.
Hide responses: by default, participants will be able to see the responses of other participants. Toggle this setting on to hide responses from other participants.
Enable comments: toggle this setting off to prevent poll participants adding a comment

Notifications

New response notifications: turn this setting on to receive an email notification whenever a new response is received
New comment notifications: turn this setting on to receive an email notification whenever a new comment is received

When you've finished setting up the poll, click on the Save and Publish button at the top right of the page.

You have the choice to Publish immediately, or you can schedule the poll to open at a later date.

By default, the closing date for a poll is the next to last available day offered. But you can change this to close sooner if you prefer. No one will be able to respond after a poll has closed.

If you schedule the poll to open at a later date, it will be marked as "Upcoming".

Share with Participants

To share your poll, click on the Share and Invite tab on the left hand settings menu.

Copy the link to send it by email or text, or invite specific participants directly from modal.

Up to 50 people can participate in each poll.

"Prioritize invited participants’ responses" means the responses by those people will be given more weight when we suggest the best date for your event.

For more information about sharing of Public and Private polls, see How to Share a Poll

Collect Responses

Your guests can reply with three choices. They can indicate times which are great for them (Yes), not ideal but ok (Maybe), or not at all possible (No). If you allow it in your settings, they can even leave comments to give more context.

Stay Notified

You can make sure you're aware of the responses to your poll by activating notifications. You can choose to:

Get alerted when a new response comes in
Get alerted when someone adds a comment
Email the participant to confirm their response
Alert the participant to time and date of the finalized meeting
Alert the participant when the poll could not be finalized

For examples of these emails, see Meeting Poll Notifications

Only invitees who have responded to the poll will receive notifications about the finalized meeting.

Finalize the Meeting

When everyone has replied, you'll see a recommended date and time that the most people are free. You can set the filter below to "sort by availability" to see all the dates with the most Yes responses first.

Select Confirm time to finalize the poll and set the date. We will send an email to participants and add a calendar event for that time and date to the Google, Microsoft or Outlook calendar that you have integrated with your YCBM account. All respondents will be included as guests.

If you cannot find a time that works for everyone, you can cancel the poll and we will alert participants that it wasn't possible to find a time.

Managing your Polls

The number of active polls you can have on your dashboard is based on your plan.

Free plan	1 active poll
Individual plan	3 active polls
Professional plan	20 active polls
Team plan	50 active polls

You can view all polls on your account Dashboard, filtered on upcoming or past polls. This filter is based on the available date options in each poll. Use the three dots at the end of the row to see results, edit settings, invite participants, duplicate or delete the poll.

Polls Status

You will see all your polls listed with one of 6 statuses.

Draft - the poll has been created, but isn't yet published.

Upcoming - the poll has been created, but is not yet open because the pre-set open date is still in the future. At this stage, the poll isn't publicly viewable, but you can invite participants. The invitations will be sent when the poll is automatically opened.

Open - the poll is open for responses. Public polls can be seen by anyone; a Private poll can be seen by invitation. Participants can submit their responses and comments, and you can continue to invite additional participants. The poll will have an automatic closing date, set by you. While the poll is open, you can confirm or cancel the poll.

Closed - the poll is no longer accepting responses because the Close Date has passed. This could be the default date, or it could be a pre-set Close Date of your choosing. You can still confirm or cancel the poll based on the responses you have received, but you can no longer invite additional participants.

Confirmed - the poll is no longer active because you have selected the best date and time for your event and notified participants.

Cancelled - the poll is no longer active because you weren't able to find a suitable time for your event.

Expired - the poll hasn't been confirmed or cancelled, but all available options for dates are in the past.

Duplicate a poll

If you've created a poll that you love and don't want to have to recreate it every time you need a new one, you can duplicate your poll to use it again.

Find the three dots next to the polls you want to copy and select Duplicate poll to create new draft poll.