Voting and Surveys!

Ideas
1

I’ve only been a pack leadership volunteer for 2 months, have only been using TroopTrack for a few weeks and already we are loving it.

Aside from agreeing with the need to be able to send to TroopTrack mail boxes from external accounts, I have one other idea request:

Has anyone considered a Voting or Survey feature?

In the short time I’ve been involved, I have already noted at least two instances where it would have been useful to use Trooptrack to vote on things, such as:

What night of the week to have meetings? (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun)
Which of the following dates will work best for the Movie night? (July 2, July 10, Aug 5)

Would it be possible to be able to create a Voting or Polling feature that would enable us to enter, say, up to seven different options, and then use either a “Plurality” or “Ranked” voting method?

Otherwise… has anyone figured out how to use existing TroopTrack features to do voting of this sort? I’d love to be able to knock off yet another tool (like SurveyMonkey) from our kit.

Thanks!

Mike

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2

Quick update - just thought I would share this tidbit - I found a remarkably useful site called http://www.poll-maker.com.

It has a ton of things you can customize and then the best part is you can embed it right in a TroopTrack page, using the feature. Looks VERY nifty…

sample-voting.png964×757 205 KB

1 Like
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@njmike, This is AWESOME!! Is this embedded in the internal web page? Could you give us a quick step by step on how you did this?

Thanks
Roscoe

1 Like
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@SRUEDU Is this something we could use?

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@ChristyWestover1 I definitely think so!!

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I’m happy to provide more details about doing this, but if I go too far I will be abusing the purpose of this thread.

Here it is in a nutshell – if enough people need more details, I could be convinced to do a more thorough how-to; it’s not trivial.

  1. Pick a web-based survey-tool that suits your needs, AND (this is important) offers you the ability to share the poll/survey using “embed” code. (I found 2 that work nicely, http://www.poll-maker.com and http://www.surveymonkey.com).

  2. Craft your survey using the tool. Locate the “embed” code. (For example, SurveyMonkey has a nice write-up on this: Embedding Your Survey on a Website)

  3. Create a private (or public, I suppose… whatever your preference) web page on your Trooptrack site.

  4. Edit the page, click on the top-left button in the web page editor. It looks like a page with “<>” on it and the word “Source”.

  5. Take the “embed code” you located in step 2, and paste it into the Troop Track web page editor.

  6. Click “Save Page” and you are done.

Now… after fooling with this for a while, I realized that I didn’t just want all my survey pages floating around in the TroopTrack, so I threw away my test pages, and created a new “top-level” survey web page called… “Surveys” (surprise!) – it doesn’t have to have anything on it, but now when you create more surveys on your TroopTrack website, you create them under this Page for organizational purposes.

But of course, I couldn’t just leave good-enough alone, so I went back to edit this Surveys page, and put a table on it, to create a single page where membership can see the surveys, their closing dates, and a link for Leadership to use to review the statistics of open surveys, and where I will archive the results for closed surveys.

Now… if all of this was functionality built directly into Troop Track, it would probably have saved me a few hours, but I can see now that in order to get all the features I would want, that this might be a “significant” programming effort on their parts. STILL… still… maybe it would be enough for our TroopTrack developer-geniuses to enable use of APIs so these things could be embedded a little more cleanly? For example, I don’t like that SurveyMonkey requires you to visit their site to see the analysis. And, then there’s the nagging SurveyMonkey footer… etc. etc. etc.

Good luck!

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