Collect Data in the Field with the Polldaddy iPad app

Do you need to conduct surveys in the field, say at a trade show, in the classroom, on the street, at a shopping mall, or a political rally? Polldaddy’s iOS application offers a great way to collect data in the field. You can create a survey within minutes, sync it up to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch and then conduct it anywhere you’ll find your participants. Did you know that you don’t even need an internet connection? The iOS app can collect your data while you’re offline. When you return to the grid, you can sync your data to your Polldaddy.com account and begin your analysis. What’s more? It works with quizzes, too.

In today’s post, we’re going to cover how to get started with the iOS app.

The free Polldaddy iPad app works with all of our account types including our free account. To download it, go to the app store on your iPad and search for “polldaddy.” Alternatively you can download the app directly below.

Download Polldaddy for iPad

Getting started

Open the application once you have it installed on your iPad. Initially you will be asked to enter the email address and password that you use to log into Polldaddy:

Install the app on multiple iOS devices

You’ll only need to enter your Polldaddy account credentials once. The application will remember you ever after. Note that you can install the iPad app on as many iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads as you like and use them all to conduct surveys and quizzes on the street under a single Polldaddy.com account. On first load you will be shown a list of the surveys that you have on your Polldaddy account:

Scroll down to see the quizzes in your account:

Select content to conduct surveys and quizzes offline

You can select any of these for offline use by clicking on them and then pressing the blue Save Selections button at the bottom of the screen. Pressing the Cloud icon on the top of the screen shows you the content you have selected to be available offline. Here, we’ve got a survey and a quiz selected:

Once you add a survey or quiz to your iPad, you no longer need to have a data connection to use the app. Those surveys and quizzes are now downloaded onto the device. Please note that at this time, the iPad app does not support images in offline content. Images in your surveys and quizzes will only be available when the iPad has an internet connection.

Take your show on the road—get responses!

Now, we’re ready to take our Trivia Quiz on the road. Simply select the quiz to get started. You can hand off the iPad and have participants complete the quiz. At the end, they’ll see the results, if you’ve set up the quiz to allow participants to see results when you created it in your Polldaddy.com dashboard:

Syncing responses to Polldaddy.com

Once you’ve collected some responses you will need to sync these back to your Polldaddy.com account. To do this, click on the Cloud icon to see a list of your offline content and the number of offline responses for each. We’ve got one offline repsonse we’d like to sync back to our Polldaddy.com account:

To sync your quiz, tap on the title to reveal a contextual menu. You can either start the quiz, review the responses you’ve collected, or sync the responses back to Polldaddy.com. Since we want to sync up our responses, choose the Sync to Polldaddy option in the dialog:

Next, you’ll see a progress bar and a success indicator once your sync is complete:

All of the responses we collected offline on the iPad will show up in our quiz reports back on Polldaddy.com.