Vottiv Polling allows campaigns to run professional, statistically valid voter polls directly from the platform. This guide walks through the full polling workflow—from creating and launching a poll to reviewing results and turning insights into action.

Why Polling Matters

Polling helps campaigns understand what voters are thinking so you can make informed strategic decisions. By collecting real feedback on priorities, preferences, and local issues, polling allows you to:

• Test messaging

• Identify key issues

• Understand voter sentiment

• Adjust outreach strategy before Election Day

Accessing the Polling Dashboard

From your account home:

1. Open the left-hand navigation

2. Click Polling

On the Polling page, you’ll see:

• Create a Poll

• Active Polls

• Archived Polls

You’ll also find a Learn About Polling section that explains the methodology and key concepts used in Vottiv polling.

Creating and Launching a Poll

Step 1: Name Your Poll

Give your poll a name and optionally describe what you’re trying to learn. This takes about five minutes total to create a poll.

Step 2: Build Your Questions

You can add questions in one of two ways:

• Write your own using multiple choice, multi-select, rating scales, or open-ended formats, or

• Use AI to generate questions

When using AI, describe your research goal in plain English. Vottiv:

• Reviews your poll description

• Generates AAPOR-compliant, neutral questions

If needed, you can:

• Edit the description

• Regenerate the question

• Manually adjust wording

Step 3: Select a Voter Group & Sample Size

Choose an existing voter group from your account. Vottiv will display:

• Total voters in the group

• Voters with cell phone numbers

• Percentage of reachable voters

Then choose what percentage of that group you’d like to sample:

• Small sample (1-10%): Quick directional reads

• Medium sample (10-40%): Solid data for campaign decisions

• Large sample (40%+): High-confidence results

Use the sample slider to select the percentage. As you adjust the slider, Vottiv automatically shows:

• Estimated margin of error

• Estimated cost

• Expected response count

The system automatically stratifies your sample across party registration, age group, gender, and geography so your results reflect the actual makeup of your target voters.

Step 4: Review, Pay, and Launch

Before launching, review:

• Poll name

• Selected voter group

• Sample size

• Cost

• SMS message preview

You can regenerate the SMS message if needed. Choose a payment method:

• Campaign credits

• Credit card

Once payment is confirmed, the poll launches immediately. Polls are delivered via SMS text message with a unique survey link during optimal engagement windows (midday and early evening in the voter’s local timezone). If a voter doesn’t open the invitation, the system automatically sends up to two reminders.

What Voters Experience

Voters receive a single SMS message with a link to the poll.

• No login required

• No app download

• Questions can be completed in seconds

This reduces friction and improves response rates. Optionally, you can enable identity verification at the end of the survey where respondents identify themselves from five names. Vottiv uses progressive response capture, so partial responses (e.g., answering 3 of 5 questions) are still saved in real time.

Viewing and Understanding Poll Results

Once responses start coming in, you can analyze results directly in Vottiv. Your poll dashboard updates in real time.

Step 1: Open Poll Analytics

1. Go to Polling

2. Find your poll

3. Click View Analytics

Step 2: Review the Overview Tab

The Overview tab provides a high-level snapshot, including:

• Total poll cost

• Overall response rate and completion rate

• Summary performance metrics

This is a quick check before diving deeper. You will also receive automated email updates: a confirmation when the poll goes live, daily progress reports, and a completion summary with full results.

Step 3: Review Question Results (Results Tab)

Click the Results tab to view charts for each question.

Each result is shown in two ways:

• Light color: Raw responses

  • The actual percentage of respondents who chose each option

• Dark color: Weighted responses

  • Adjusted to better represent your target population using automatic demographic stratification

You’ll also see a confidence interval (margin of error at 95% confidence) for each result and demographic breakdowns (by party, age, gender, ethnicity, and location).

Example:
52% ± 3% means the true value likely falls between 49% and 55%.

Tip:
Use weighted results when making strategic decisions—they better reflect the full population.

Step 4: Compare Groups Side by Side (Crosstabs Tab)

Click the Crosstabs tab to see who answered what. Crosstabs let you compare how different groups of respondents answered the same question—for example, how Democrats answered compared with Republicans, or how people who approve of one thing answered a second question.

Building a crosstab takes two choices:

1. Show answers to — pick the question you want to analyze

2. Broken down by — pick either a demographic (Party, Age Group, Gender, or Ethnicity) or any other question in the poll

How to read the table

Read the table one row at a time. Each row is a group of respondents—Democrats, voters aged 18-24, or everyone who answered “Approve” on another question—and the percentages across that row show how that group answered the question you selected.

• A row normally adds up to 100%. If the question allowed people to choose more than one answer, the row can add up to more than 100%—the table notes this when it applies.

• Percentages are weighted the same way as the Results tab, so the two views reconcile. Hover over any cell to see the unweighted percentage and the raw number of respondents behind it.

• Each row shows n, the number of respondents in that group.

• An All respondents total row appears at the bottom of every table so you can see how each group compares with the poll overall.

Small samples

Groups with fewer than 30 respondents are flagged with a small sample warning. The numbers are still shown, but treat them as directional rather than conclusive—a handful of responses can swing a percentage dramatically.

Good to know

• Slider questions can’t be crosstabbed, so they don’t appear in either picker.

• The poll’s PDF report includes the complete set of crosstab tables for every question—all four demographics plus every question-by-question combination. Questions with many answer options are split across several sub-tables so they stay readable, and rows based on small samples are marked with an asterisk.

Step 5: Understand Your Sample (Stratification Tab)

Click the Stratification tab to see how your sample breaks down into subgroups (strata), such as:

• Age

• Party affiliation

• Geography

• Gender and ethnicity

For each stratum, Vottiv shows:

• Share of the sample

• Invites sent

• Responses received

• Response rate

• Weight applied

How Weighting Works

Vottiv calculates adjustments with iterative proportional fitting (also called raking). This repeatedly balances responses to the target party, age, and gender totals together, so the displayed adjustment for a row is not simply its Share of Voters divided by its Share of Responses.

• An adjustment greater than 1 means those responses count more; an adjustment below 1 means they count less.

• Adjustments may be capped so no single response can dominate the result.

• Adjustments update continuously as responses arrive.

• Only currently valid answer selections contribute to results, weights, precision, and exports. If a respondent selected only an answer that was later hidden, that respondent is excluded from those calculations.

Unequal adjustments can reduce the effective sample size. Vottiv uses that effective sample size for the displayed margin of error, so the precision note reflects the cost of weighting rather than treating every response as equally informative. If there are zero or one eligible responses, Vottiv shows a conservative ±100% margin rather than a misleading ±0%.

Step 6: Review Open-Ended Responses (Comments Tab)

Click the Comments tab to read any open-ended feedback submitted by voters.

This qualitative data can provide context and nuance behind the numbers.

The poll’s PDF report includes a Respondent Comments section containing every comment, each shown with the respondent’s name and the date they responded, newest first. Comments without a matching voter record are listed as Anonymous. On a poll with an unusually large number of comments the report shows the most recent 2,000 and points you to the CSV export, which is never capped.

Step 7: Download the PDF Report

Click Export PDF on the poll’s analytics page to download a formatted report you can hand to a team, a client, or a reporter.

The report opens with an Executive Summary that gives you the whole poll at a glance:

• An opening line covering when the poll was fielded, who it went to, and how many people completed it. A poll that is still collecting responses is described as being in the field, and its response count is presented as a running total rather than a final one.

• Four headline numbers side by side: completes, response rate, margin of error, and engagement, each with a short note explaining what it was measured against.

• An AAPOR transparency notice stating how the poll was conducted and whether the results are weighted.

• A Who Responded section that charts the share of respondents by party, age, gender, and ethnic group, so you can see the makeup of your sample without hunting for it. All four charts use the same 0–100% scale so they can be compared with each other. Categories that simply have nothing on file, such as Unknown, are drawn in a neutral gray so they don’t read as findings, and a long tail of very small categories is grouped into one row.

• Key Findings: the leading answer on each of the first five questions and how far ahead of the next answer it sits. Every question is still reported in full in the topline pages that follow.

The exact respondent counts behind those charts are still shown as tables in the Respondent Demographics section later in the report, alongside the full topline, methodology, stratification, crosstab appendix, and comments.

Turning Poll Results Into Action

Once you’ve reviewed:

• Overview metrics

• Weighted vs. raw results

• Crosstabs comparing groups

• Stratification and weights

• Open-ended comments

• Margin of error at 95% confidence

• Demographic breakdowns

You can use poll insights to:

• Refine campaign messaging

• Adjust targeting

• Prioritize issues

• Design follow-up polls to test new ideas

Need to dig deeper? Export a full CSV report for offline analysis. It includes question results, stratification, comments, and two sets of crosstab tables—one breaking each question down by party, age, gender, and ethnicity, and one breaking each question down by the answers given to every other question. Crosstab percentages are row percentages, and each group’s respondent count is included along with a flag for groups under 30 respondents. Meaningful zero values remain visible, and spreadsheet programs open formula-like text safely as text. The same complete CSV report is attached to the poll-completion email.

Poll Lifecycle Summary

1. Create and launch a poll

2. Collect responses via SMS

3. Review weighted and raw results

4. Compare groups with crosstabs

5. Analyze stratification and comments

6. Apply insights to campaign strategy

Archived polls remain accessible for reference and comparison.

Watch Polling in Action

Prefer to see it step by step?
Watch our short video walkthroughs to see how to create a poll and analyze poll results in Vottiv.

• ▶️ Creating a Poll in Vottiv
  Learn how to build questions, select a voter group, set your sample size, and launch a poll.

• ▶️ Analyzing Poll Results in Vottiv
  Learn how to interpret weighted vs. raw results, understand confidence intervals, explore crosstabs, dig into stratification, and turn insights into action.