Using 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, it's 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 set 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:
- 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 on to allow poll participants to add a comment about their response
- Send response confirmation: turn this setting on to trigger an email to participants to confirm their response
- New vote 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 Create and Share button at the top right of the page.
Share with Participants
You can send the link by email - or invite specific participants directly from the 'Share' 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.
Note: if you haven't finalized the meeting by selecting one of the times, your poll will automatically close on the first day offered as an option. No one will be able to respond after that 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 dates available in the polls. Use the three dots at the end of the row to see results, edit settings, or invite someone.
For answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Meeting Polls, see Meeting Polls FAQs
For further questions, contact our team at support@youcanbook.me.
Access your YCBM Dashboard