Getting started with meeting polls

What is a meeting poll?

A Calendly meeting poll combines both voting and scheduling in a few simple steps:

  1. You create your meeting details and offer times to meet.
  2. People vote on their preferred times.
  3. You choose the best time, and Calendly schedules the meeting for you.

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Benefits

  • Consolidate tools: Calendly will handle voting and scheduling.
  • Take everyone’s time into consideration: Let people vote on their preferred times for upcoming meetings.
  • Find the best time to meet: Book a single time to meet with a single host or multiple hosts, with multiple attendees, based on the times they prefer.
  • Turn voters into attendees: Calendly will automatically send calendar invites and meeting details to everyone who votes in a poll.

Ways you can use meeting polls

You can use meeting polls for one-to-many (group) or multi-host (collective) meetings.

Some examples include:

    • A meeting with colleagues
    • A collaborative working session
    • A review with stakeholders
    • A dinner with friends or family

How meeting polls work

Creating a meeting poll

For step-by-steps on creating a meeting poll, view Create and book a meeting poll.

Types of meetings 

Meeting polls are designed for one-to-many (group) meetings, or multi-host (collective) meetings.
If you’d like one invitee to choose a time, we recommend creating a one-off meeting instead.

Offering times

Number of times you can offer
You can select up to 40 times to offer to poll participants.
Date range
The date range of a meeting poll cannot exceed three months.
Prioritize offered times over existing meetings

When offering times, Calendly automatically takes your availability and connected calendars into consideration.

However, to prioritize your meeting, you can offer and book times that overlap with existing meetings, as long as they are not Calendly-scheduled meetings.

Reserving offered times

If you’d like to prevent new bookings while people are still voting on times, you can reserve times.

Reserving times will place holds on your calendar for all offered times, to prevent double-booking. Once your meeting is booked, Calendly will remove the holds from your calendar. Calendly will also remove holds if the pending meeting is deleted.

Note that, after a meeting has been booked or a poll has been deleted, it can take several minutes to remove the holds from your calendar.

To reserve times, view Step 2: Set up meeting details.

Voting in a meeting poll

Who can vote in a poll

Anyone who has your meeting poll link can vote in the poll and attend the meeting. Participants do not need to have a Calendly account, or be logged in to a Calendly account, to vote.

Voting on someone’s behalf
You can vote on behalf of your attendee, by visiting your live polling link and inputting your attendee’s name and email on the booking page. To access your link, go to the Pending section of your Meetings page, and select View active meeting poll.
Voting across timezones
Calendly will automatically detect your participant’s timezone from their browser or device. When poll participants visit the meeting poll page, Calendly will convert the offered times to their timezones.
Maximum number of voters
A maximum of 40 unique participants can vote in a poll, based on their email address. A participant cannot vote with the same email address more than once.
What voters can see
By default, while voting, participants can see who else is voting as well as what times people are voting for. In addition, once the meeting is scheduled, participants can see the emails of the other attendees on the calendar invite.
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Receiving poll updates
After you create a meeting poll, you’ll receive an email with your meeting poll link for easy access. You’ll also receive an email with voting updates each time a participant votes.

Managing your meeting poll

Editing your poll

Once a meeting poll is live, you can edit it from the Pending screen.

Changing or canceling a vote
In the instance you are looking to make changes to times offered on a meeting poll and would like to allow your invitees to change their votes, you will need to:

1. Visit your Meetings page Pending tab
2. Select Edit Poll
3. Change the dates/times offered
4. Select Next
5. Scroll down and select the checkbox "Notify participants and allow them to update their votes"
6. Select Share meeting poll to ping your invitees to vote on the new times.

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Adding a person after people have voted
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You can add additional invitees at the time of scheduling the event from a Meeting poll. Simply navigate to the Meeting poll in your Pending section, select Add invitee, and enter the additional invitee's name and email address.
Removing a person from a poll
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If an unwanted person votes in your poll, you can remove them before you schedule the meeting.
To do so, select Book Meeting Time. You'll see a list of invitees where you can select remove next to any invitee.
Deleting a poll
If you delete a poll, the poll link will no longer be active, and invitees will no longer be able to vote. The poll will be removed from your Pending meetings. You cannot recover a deleted poll, but you can create a new one.
Rescheduling a poll
You cannot reschedule a poll, but Calendly is considering this as a future enhancement.
Polling permissions
Admins on your account will have access to your meeting poll from your Meetings page.

Booking the meeting

Poll closing date

A poll will close when:

  • You book a meeting time.
  • The offered times have passed (the poll link has expired).
Book a meeting time

You can book a meeting time from the Pending tab in your Meetings page.

You can book a time as soon as one person votes. Calendly will automatically show the top three votes, but you can expand to view all results.

Meeting notifications
Calendly will automatically send a calendar invitation with your meeting details to everyone who voted in the poll. At the moment, meeting polls does not support Workflows (email reminders or text reminders).

After the meeting

Exporting meeting details

You can view and download details about your meeting from the Meetings page.

Read next

Create and book a meeting poll