Zoom Meetings - Pro Tip #1: Enhanced Polling and Meeting Templates

[Bort]

With Zoom’s new enhanced polling features, you can:

• Have participants answer multiple choice questions
• Rank provided choices
• Match items to one another
• Include images for each question
• Set correct answers to transform the poll into a quiz. 

This is a great set of tools for educators, those involved in market research, or just making a presentation more interactive. Knowing that creating these polls in Zoom takes time and effort, this Pro Tip will show you how to create a poll once and be able to use it again for other meetings days, weeks, or even months later. 

 

Creating the polls

I won’t go into too much detail regarding how to create a poll, as our Advanced Polling For Meetings article provides much more information, but let’s go through the basics: 

1. Ensure advanced polling is enabled in your web settings. 
2. Schedule a meeting as you would typically for this meeting.
   Notes: 
• You can also use an existing meeting, as long as it is not using your PMI.
• The meeting cannot use your PMI and cannot use E2E Encryption. 
3. Once the meeting is scheduled, scroll down to find the Polls/Quizzes tab. 
4. Click Create and select Advanced Polls and Quizzes. 
5. Create the questions as you need. See the support article for more information.
   Note: With advanced polling you can create a max of 50 polls for a single meeting, with each poll having a max of 50 questions. Standard polling is limited to just 10 questions per poll. 
6. Click Save. 
   
7. (Optional) Repeat steps 4-6 as necessary to create additional sets of polls. 

 

Creating a template

Now that you have created your poll(s), let's create a template from that meeting, which we can use to create more meetings with those same polls and other settings at a later date. We can create a template before the meeting is ever used or afterwards, but the meeting still needs to exist on your account. *Remember* meetings will expire 30 days after the scheduled date or when it was last used. 

1. Go to the Meetings page in the web portal and find the meeting you want to make a template out of. If it was scheduled for a date in the past, it may be in the Previous tab. 
2. Click on the meeting topic to view the meeting and its settings. 
3. Scroll down to find the Save as Template options, which is located next to Start, Edit, and Delete buttons.
   Note: Most meeting settings and polling information is saved in a template, but the original date and time, any alternative hosts, and post meeting surveys are not. 
4. Click that option and name the template. For educators, you may name the template after the course and section these polls cover, such as “Biology 101 - Chapter 3”

 

Managing templates and scheduling meetings from a template

Now that you have created a template, you can view all your templates from the Meeting Templates tab of the Meetings page. You can view what each template has by clicking on the name of it, delete templates you no longer need, or schedule a new meeting based on a template. Templates can also be edited, in case you need to adjust a setting or perhaps a typo in a poll. 

You can also choose a template when scheduling a meeting by clicking the drop-down menu next to Template. Keep in mind, scheduling from templates is only available when scheduling through the web portal. 

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Thanks for reading and feel free to ask any related questions or provide your own tips for polling or templates in the replies below!

[dd2]

I'm finding the templates useless as they cannot be updated to scheduled or ongoing meetings. A simple example is: I have 4 scheduled meetings based on a template that has my polls. I notice a poll has a typo. I correct the typo in the template and it is not updated in my meetings. I have to go into each meeting and edit the typo (4 times). Waste of time and energy.

It would be nice to completely separate out the quiz/polling feature from meetings. Have a quiz/poll section and in any meeting at any time, you can select what poll(s) you want to add. You would only have to change/edit/add/delete polls in one master list and these changes would be updated in all meetings that the poll is located. This is how LMSs work - often called questions banks.

[Bort]

Unfortunately, templates do not have the functionality you described. Once a meeting is created from a template, any changes made to either the meeting or the template has no effect on the other. 

I encourage you to visit our Zoom Feedback form, which is the official way to share any feedback or feature requests with the Zoom team. Thanks!

[angelitali1970]

A question re: Image in Advanced Polling Questions, when you get a chance.

I have uploaded one image (each between 27-56kb) in each question, first couple of test runs all images shown on 3 different devices (Android 9, 10, and iOS). Then today when the actual meeting started, we found out that some images did not display on some of the devices, one user actually did not see any images. I can't find any solutions anywhere. Hope you can help. Thank you!

[Bort]

Hard to say what could have caused that without knowing more about the devices that were not able to view the images. Could be they are connected with the wrong version of the app, or some other unknown issue. I would first have them try reinstalling the Zoom app on their devices, which will both reset the app and ensure they are on the latest version. 

[angelitali1970]

Thank you so much for your reply.
I have contacted CS to troubleshoot, apparently for Android devices the host must launch and end the poll, wait for a minute the re-launch the poll again in order to show images. And that's the only way it would work.

Hope they will make some improvement in the future.

[famrqz]

Hi, if my zoom meetings are created through calendly, will the template automatically be utilized?

[Bort]

I don't think Calendly allows the use of templates. As far as I know, Calendly and other such integrations only schedule a meeting based on your default settings. 

[abelniak]

According to the support article, any co-host can launch polls (that have been previously created). The support articles I've read also state that this is true for breakout rooms. In my experience, my co-hosts (made them co-hosts *before* moving to breakouts) do not have the ability to launch a pre-made poll once in a breakout. Am I doing something incorrect?