You're now ready to start your first Poll. When you first create a Poll, it is in the Ready to Start state. While in the Ready to Start state, your crowd will be allowed to sign in to your Poll, but they will not be able to start voting until you start your Poll. Once they have signed in on the Participant View, your participants will see a message indicating the Poll will begin shortly.

By default, the Countdown Timer is enabled and set to 10 seconds in duration, which can always be edited. If your Poll has the Countdown Timer enabled, then your Poll will count down for the duration set before going live. Before initiating the Countdown Timer, confirm the Active Question is set to Question 1. The Poll will automatically begin once the timer finishes counting down.

To initiate the Countdown Timer for your Poll, click on the blue Countdown Timer with a clock icon under the Playback Controls heading on the Experience Dashboard. Once you click this button, a prompt will pop up confirming the initiation to Start the Poll's Countdown Timer.

By default, this setting is enabled and will automatically start the Poll once the Countdown Timer ends. Disabling this setting is useful if you have a long Countdown Timer for an upcoming event (e.g. several hours or more) but you would like to display or present content before starting the Experience once the Countdown Timer ends.

Choosing this option will begin the Countdown Timer as normal. If you have the previous Auto-Start When Countdown Ends feature enabled, this will begin the first question of the Poll. Alternatively, if the previous setting is disabled, the Poll will not begin at the end of the timer until the host manually activates the Poll.

Selecting this option will skip the Countdown Timer completely and will begin your Experience immediately instead. If you previously disabled the Auto-Start When Countdown Ends feature, you can select Skip Countdown once you're ready to begin the Experience after the Countdown Timer has ended.

If you have disabled the Countdown Timer, then your Poll will be live as soon as you press the Start button. To make your Poll Live and allow crowd-voting on the first question, you will need to Start it.

To begin the Poll, simply click on the green circular Play button under the Playback Controls heading in the upper-left corner of the Experience Dashboard. After clicking the Play button, your Poll is now in the Live state.

Your Poll will now display the current Active Question on the Participant View that you opened earlier in this tutorial and also on the mobile device of any player who is signed in to your Poll. The Play button now turns into a Pause button if you need to pause your Poll.

As soon as you start your Poll, the current Active Question is open for participants to vote on using their mobile devices. So be ready to vote on the Participant View as soon as your start your Poll!

If you're playing along in the Participant View, you should be signed in already. Once you start your Poll, you should see the first question ready to be voted on. Next, go ahead and answer the first question. As soon as you vote, you'll see that the Participant View updates to show all Live Answer Results for the question automatically by default. This is an option that you can enable or disable later in your Poll. For now, it only shows our single vote.

When you update the Active Question to a new question, each participant may cast a vote on that question until you move on to the next question. By default, a participant may only cast a single vote per question. This keeps voting fair, so if you revisit a question, the participant will not be able to vote again if they've already voted.

During your live event and Poll, there may be times when you may want to pause the voting. Pausing your Poll will temporarily stop your crowd from voting on questions and will show the crowd a Voting Paused message on their mobile devices as displayed below.

To pause a Poll, simply click on the yellow circular Pause button under Playback Controls. To resume a Poll and continue voting, simply click the button again which has now turned into the Play button to indicate that this will resume your Poll.