Among many chat applications available today, GroupMe solely focuses on providing group chats between friends. Launched in 2010, the app currently has some 10 million monthly active users in the United States alone.
One of the welcome additions to GroupMe was the 2017 poll feature. With this, you’re now able to reach a democratic vote on any topic you choose. This comes in useful if there’s an urgent business decision that requires resolving. It’s also great to use polls when choosing a place to go on a night out with your friends.
Anonymous Polls?
By allowing your chat members to vote on a question you pose, you can get the group’s opinion fairly quickly. But, if you want to find out who voted for which option, unfortunately that’s not possible with GroupMe polls. So, to answer the question bluntly, yes, these polls are actually anonymous.
Whether this is a good or unfavorable solution remains to be a topic for future discussion. What’s important is that you’ll definitely get the group’s voice on the topic at hand.
You Can’t Delete Them
One adverse side-effect that polls have on your GroupMe chat experience is that you can’t delete them. That means that any polls you or your friends create will remain in the chat’s history for good.
Although this initially adds to clutter in the chat screen, it does allow you to keep a record of the group’s opinion. You can always go back to that moment in time and see what the prevalent consensus was back then.
Of course, when the poll screen pops-up in your chat, you can hide it from your view once you answer it. And if you need to access any past polls for a specific group, you can do so by going to the “Expired” tab of the poll menu.
Options Available
The previous two sections covered what you can’t do with GroupMe polls. Now let’s take a look at what you can do.
When creating a poll, first you add the question you want to ask. With 160 characters available, that’s plenty enough to express yourself. Next, you type in the poll options. The default value here is two, with the maximum of up to 10 questions.
That’s more than enough, since you don’t want too many options in your poll. Imagine if your group had five members and you create a poll with ten questions. Chances are your poll will prove inconclusive, thus undermining the purpose of it.
When you finish adding the poll question and the available answers, you can proceed to set the time limit when your poll should expire. Currently, the maximum duration is two weeks in the future. Of course, there’s also a minimum duration for your poll, which is set to 15 minutes by default.
It’s important to point out that there’s a limit to the number of polls that can be active at any time. That limit is 50 polls. Considering the polls help your group to reach a decision on a certain topic, this number of active polls seem quite reasonable. If not, a little excessive.
Reaching an Agreement
Although you can’t know for sure who voted for which option, your polls will definitely provide a result. Whether that’s in line with your expectations or something completely opposite, the polls are there to make a collective decision.
Are anonymous answers working for you? Do you really need to know who voted for each of the options? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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