Slack poll guides

Posting a question with buttons is the easy part. The differences that matter to a company are elsewhere: what the app can see in Slack, how it's secured, how the price grows with your headcount, and whether it covers surveys and anonymous feedback as well as quick votes.

A poll that never closes never quite decides anything: votes trickle in, the result shifts, and nobody knows when to act. An automatic close fixes the deadline up front. In Simple Poll you add close after and a duration, and the poll closes on its own. Automatic closing is a Premium feature; anyone can close their own poll by hand.

To create a poll in Slack, add the Simple Poll app to your workspace, then type /poll "Your question" "Option 1" "Option 2" in any channel and press Enter. Check the preview and click Create Poll. Everyone in the channel can vote with one click, and the totals update live. It is free for polls with up to 5 options.

In a ranked choice poll, each person puts the options in order of preference instead of picking one. Simple Poll counts the result with instant-runoff voting, so the winner is the option with the broadest support, not just the most first choices. Ranked polls work on every plan.

A scale poll asks people to rate something from 1 to 5: how clear the plan is, how the sprint went, how confident they are in a date. The poll shows how the votes spread across the five points, and its results view adds the average and median, which a yes or no poll can't give you. Scale polls work on every plan.

To create a recurring poll in Slack, type /poll on its own to open Simple Poll's form, write the poll, click Schedule, and pick a repeat: daily, every weekday, weekly, every 2 weeks, monthly or annually. Simple Poll then posts it on that schedule, so your weekly pulse or daily check-in never depends on someone remembering. Recurring polls are a Premium feature.

To create a survey in Slack, type /poll and press Enter to open Simple Poll's form, add your first question, then click Add more questions for the rest, up to 20. Or type the whole survey as one /poll command with --- between the questions. It posts as one message; people click Open and answer in a pop-up without leaving Slack.

To create an anonymous poll in Slack, type /poll "Your question" "Option 1" "Option 2" anonymous and press Enter. The word anonymous after the last quote hides who voted for what from everyone, including you as the creator. The poll still counts every vote and shows the totals, and it is free on every plan.

When people can see a running tally, they tend to pile onto the leading option or skip voting once the result looks settled. Hiding the results until the poll closes gets you each person's own answer. In Simple Poll it's one keyword, and it works on every plan.

Sometimes you don't know all the options yet: the best venue, a name for the new team, the topic everyone actually wants. Turn on adding options and voters get an Add option button. Anything they add becomes an option everyone can vote on. It's free on every plan.

By default, a Simple Poll lets each person pick as many options as they like. That's right for "which days can you make?" and wrong for "which date should we pick?". A vote limit caps how many options each person can choose: limit 1 for single choice, limit 2 or more for "pick your top two". Vote limits are a Premium feature.

"Emoji poll" means two things in Slack. One is a message where people vote by reacting with an emoji, which needs no app. The other is a proper poll where each option carries an emoji, which reads faster and still counts votes properly. This page covers both, plus the poll emoji themselves.

Slack apps can't see into private channels until someone in the channel invites them. A plain /poll still posts there, but polls from the shortcut, automatic closing, reminders, and scheduled or recurring polls need the app in the channel and fail until someone invites it. Invite Simple Poll once, and every poll after that works the same as in a public channel.

Slack doesn't have a poll feature of its own. Its help centre gives two options: install a polling app from the Slack Marketplace, or run a quick, informal poll in a message where people vote with emoji reactions. On paid Slack plans there's a third route, a Workflow Builder form.

By default, any member of a Slack workspace can install apps. Turning on app approval means members request apps and a Workspace Owner or an app manager approves or restricts each one. The steps below follow Slack's own help centre; the checks are what a careful reviewer looks at before saying yes.

An AMA, short for "ask me anything", works best when questions arrive before the session and the team decides which ones get answered first. Simple Poll's q&a poll does exactly that: people post questions, everyone upvotes the ones they want answered, and the most upvoted rise to the top. Add anonymous and people ask what they actually want to know.

To run an eNPS survey in Slack, post an anonymous Simple Poll survey with the question "How likely are you to recommend working here to a friend?", options 0 to 10 with one answer each, and an optional "why" question. Leave it open for about a week, export the answers, and calculate the score as the share of 9s and 10s minus the share of 0s to 6s.

A scheduled poll is written now and posted later, at a time when people will see it: Monday at 9am rather than Friday at 6pm. Simple Poll can schedule a poll from the /poll text or from the poll form. Scheduling is a Premium feature, though it also works on Free for the whole of December.

/poll is Simple Poll's slash command. Typed on its own, it opens the poll form. Typed with a question, options and a few keywords, it builds the whole poll in one line, shows you a preview, and posts it. This page is the reference for the one-line version.