Frequently Asked Questions

MobileCause is a simple web service for managing a variety of mobile services. Services include text2give for requesting and collecting donations over cell phones, text2broadcast for building mobile lists and messaging people and text2screen for creating and managing web or powerpoint based text polls. The poll that is embedded within the presentation or web page will update in real time once you text in.

You can vote by following the instructions shown on the poll when it is displayed. The poll does not need to be displayed to actively receive votes, but it does need to be "opened" by the presenter on the edit poll page. In the US, you send a text message to the number 27138 that contains a voting keyword, like 1234, or blue.

Our text2screen enables a poll displayed to an audience, they cast votes by sending text messages to our short code number (27138) indicating the option they wish to select. Their mobile carrier (e.g., Sprint, Verizon, AT&T) routes their text message to our web servers where the vote is counted. Once counted, the vote is displayed in real time on-screen. You can learn more on our how it works page.

Yes, a poll is a single question or prompt you are inviting your audience to interact with.

A multiple choice poll lets you define a set of fixed choices that participants can choose from. Results can be displayed in a graph. An example of a multiple choice poll might be, "Which candidate will be President in 2009?" with options like "McCain", "Obama", and "Other".

A free text poll allows participants to send free-form text responses instead of fixed choices. A free text poll might ask, "What questions do you have for the presenter?" and participants can send in any short answer they want. Their answers might be just one word, a short phrase, or an entire sentence.

A goal poll adds up numeric contributions in a rising thermometer. Goal polls are commonly used for encouraging participation at fundraisers. People in the audience can text in a pledge to donate a specific amount, followed by an encouraging comment.

You can display your audience's answers in real time on a projector for everyone to see, or just on a laptop in front of the presenter. Some polls are not used in live-event settings (for example, radio, print, or long-term exhibition voting), so a live display of results isn't that relevant.

The numbers are called "keywords", and are pre-assigned to each option so that votes get routed to the correct option. This allows us to host multiple polls on one short code. Short codes are expensive, so this scheme helps us keep our prices down. If you don't want the automatic numbers as your voting keywords, some premium plans offer the ability to select "custom keywords", like microsoft or option5.

Absolutely! When you're viewing your Poll, click on the "Web Voting" link on the right. If you send this URL to your voters they will be able to click on the option they wish to vote for and see the results.

If you want to link to a web poll from your website, you can redirect the user back to your website after they vote by appending "?redirect=http://www.yourwebsite.com/" to the end of your MobileCause URL like this:

After the user votes for an option, they will be shown a confirmation message and redirected back to your website.

Typically a vote will be displayed within 2-5 seconds. The delay depends on the voter's cellular carrier and how long it takes to route an SMS message to our SMS gateway, web servers, and finally on to live polls wherever they are being viewed. MobileCause has handled very large events with thousands of responses, and multi-day polls with hundreds of thousands of responses.

Most of our users setup their polls to allow a person to participate only once. If that's the case, then generally you should purchase a plan with an "audience size" greater than the number of people that will vote. The "audience size" is the maximum number of votes that can be received by any given poll (the number of polls you can create is unlimited). We've handled much larger polls than shown on our plans page; just contact us.

That will depend on the event you are running and who is in your audience. As with any great speech or presentation, "know your audience" applies. For sales and marketing events with partners and clients, questions about their buying experience, concerns about purchasing, and their upcoming plans are often good topics for questions. If you are a university professor, ask a question about yesterday's lecture or assess the class's comprehension of the reading. If you are a spiritual organization, the polls can serve as an anonymous response medium for the group which could be useful for forming community around sensitive questions that might be difficult to answer aloud or by a show of hands.

The simple instructions are displayed on every Poll. It helps if you provide verbal cues to your audience during the first few polls. For live events, organizers can supplement the on-screen instructions with printed instructions in an event pamphlet. After the first poll, everyone usually gets the hang of it and you can present the next polls at a faster pace.

If you want to improve poll participation, it is helpful to project your ongoing presentation on one screen, and your poll on another (that's two projectors and two separate screens). This gives the audience the convenience of responding whenever they choose.

Take a few minutes for each poll, guide the audience, and then continue your presentation. You can also show the audience the poll on one slide and then continue the presentation and come back when more results have been tallied.

There are several ways to allow people to participate remotely. The simplest way is to allow people to vote on your poll through our website. When viewing your poll, click the "Ways to Vote" panel and choose Web Voting. Notice that this web address ends in "/web". You can send this web address (URL) to remote participants. They will only see your poll and not the controls on the right hand side.

You can also use MobileCause widgets to embed live polls into your blog or website. Voting widgets can be used to allow people to vote from your web site and display the results afterward.

There are several ways. When you are viewing your poll on our website, you can send this web address (URL) to people. They will only see your summarized poll results in a graph and not the controls on the right hand side.

You can also use the MobileCause web results widget to embed poll results in your blog or website. Of course you can also download the poll results as a spreadsheet and share that file with people.

Your poll's question (but not your results) is indexed by search engines unless you disable this setting in your preferences. With indexing turned off, your polls are private unless you share the the secret poll URL (web address) with others, or embed the poll widget in a website. When you share the poll's URL, only the poll's owner can see the controls on the right, view the detailed results, or correlate answers between polls.

Click anywhere on the poll, or mouse over the lower left corner, and click "Chart Options." A panel will appear with several options to change the colors, background, font sizes, logo, and more.

Customers on any paid plan can use the Reports tab. The Reports tab lets you match up a participant's answers across multiple polls. For example, make a free text poll that asks participants to submit their name, a student ID, a pseudonym, their cell phone number, or any other identifying information. Then ask other multiple choice or free text questions as usual. By adding the identifying free text poll and any other polls to a report, you will see how each person answered each question.

Each poll lets you select whether people can use text messages, web browsers, or both to participate.

Even better, you can have your voters pre-register as participants, and restrict your poll to only allow participation from that group. This feature is available on paid education plans, and on the Presenter plan and up.

You need to know some basic CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Your webmaster can probably help you.

We have a page dedicated to explaining the structure of the widget, complete with a styled example. Learn how to style the widget using CSS that you create on your site.