How to Make a Poll on Discord - A step-by-step Guide
Online polls are a great way of gauging public opinion on various topics and matters. They can be a powerful way to get feedback on a product or service. Polls are also good for understanding the psychographics or demographics of your target audience.
If you’re a steamer and you have a Discord community, you can use polls to keep the community engaged and give your followers a way to make their views known. Further, polls have a higher participation rate than asking people to type out their answers, because they require just one click.
Even if you are a part of a company that uses Discord for work-related conversations, using polls on Discord can be really helpful. You can ask all members of the team when or where to hold a company retreat, for instance, or generate quantitative feedback on a new product feature by asking simple yes/no questions.
There are many ways to create a poll on Discord, as we explore in more detail in this article.
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How to make a poll on Discord using Emoji reactions
Using Discord’s own in-built ‘reactions’ is a great way to quickly set up a poll and generate results. The way this works is, you type in a message and send it on a channel where you want to ask the question. Note that you must tag @everyone to notify them of the poll. Next, just ask members to express their stance using Discord’s built-in emoji reactions.
For instance, if it’s a simple Yes/ No poll, you can ask members to react to the message and use the ✅ (Tick mark) for ‘Yes’ and ❌(Cross) for ‘No’.
Here’s the step-by-step process on how to make a poll on Discord using Emoji reactions:
- Step 1. Navigate to the server and channel where you want to input your poll
- Step 2. Type in your poll question
- Step 3. Press ‘Shift + Enter’ to move to a new line, tag @everyone, and type in the instructions for the poll
- Step 4. That’s it, members in the channel can input their answers to the poll question by reacting to the message with the chosen emojis
If you are running a poll with more than two options, you can number each option in the poll instructions and ask members to vote by choosing the number emojis, like this:
Note that there are both benefits and drawbacks to using reactions to make a poll on Discord.
- It’s fast and easy to set up.
- You can see results instantaneously by checking how many people have voted for which option.
- However, members won’t be able to cast their votes anonymously, because when you hover over the reactions, Discord will also show who posted that reaction.
- Members may not respect the poll’s instructions and instead react to it with irrelevant emojis.
- Further, your poll question might get drowned out by newer messages.
Create a poll channel on your Discord server
You can also create a new dedicated channel on your server for polls and questions. To do so, follow these steps:
- Step 1. Click on the ‘+’ icon next to “Text channels” on Discord, in the left sidebar
- Step 2. Enter a name for the channel (like “Polls”), and click on ‘Create Channel’
- Step 3. Click on the gear icon next to the channel name, and go to ‘Permissions’
- Step 4. Under “Roles/Members”, select @everyone and select only “Read Messages”, “Add Reactions” and disable other allowed actions
- Step 5. Click on ‘Save Changes’
Now, you can use this channel solely for the purpose of making polls on Discord. Other members of the server won’t be able to post their own messages in this channel, they’ll only be able to read and react to your poll messages.
How to use Discord poll bots to create polls
Discord is not just a text & voice chat application, but so much more. It offers extensive customisation features and even allows developers to create ‘bots’ to perform a range of tasks within the app. You’ll find Discord bots to automate certain functions and even enhance the experience by expanding the platform’s functionality.
Similarly, you can integrate the Discord bot ‘Poll Bot’ into your server to create and manage polls. Here’s how to do so:
- Step 1. Go to Poll Bot listing on the top.gg website and click on “Invite”
- Step 2. Sign in to Discord and select the server you want to add the bot to from, under the “Add to server” dropdown
- Step 3. Click on “Continue” > “Authorize”
- Step 4. Click on “Authorize” and complete the verification process
- Step 5. Now, open the Discord app (either on web/ desktop) and log in
- Step 6. Go to the server where you installed the bot, and open the channel where you want to create the poll
- Step 7. Create the poll using the bot (check below for steps)
Note that Poll Bot lets you create 3 types of polls:
1. Yes/No poll:
- Type in the following in the message box and hit enter:
- +poll Your question here
- Poll Bot will then display your question, as well as a thumbs up, thumbs down, and shrugging reaction emojis.
- Channel members can then click on the reaction emojis to cast their votes.
2. Multiple reaction poll:
- Type in the following in the message box and hit enter:
- +poll {Your question} [option 1] [option 2] [option 3]
- Poll Bot will then display a message with your question as well as alphabetical emojis for each option.
3. Strawpoll:
- Type in the following in the message box and hit enter:
- +strawpoll {Your question} [option 1] [option 2] [option 3]
- Poll Bot will then reply with a message containing a link to a poll on strawpoll.me.
- Channel members can click on the link to go to the strawpoll poll and cast their votes.
