Integrating Live Polls with Slido into a Session
Live polls, Q&A, word clouds, and more are all awesome features a platform called Slido offers, and PheedLoop neatly integrates with in its virtual event platform. PheedLoop is working to bring its mobile live polling platform to its virtual events platform later in 2021, but there are still many benefits to Slido given it specializes in session and event engagement technology. In this article, we'll cover how Slido integrates and works within PheedLoop, and share some tips.
If you have questions about Slido, we suggest exploring their amazing knowledge base and contacting their team if required. As with any integration, the team behind the platform you're integrating has the best information about specific details around how it functions. If you have questions about the integration itself, please reach out to us!
Step 1 - Create a Slido Account
Slido is free to get started with, and for most small events, what that offers is more than enough. There are paid versions that some events subscribe to for advanced functionality and increased capacity, and typically only need to sign up for a one-time use subscription. The "Engage" or "Professional" plans are enough for paid subscriptions for most events. The latter supports multiple rooms, moderation, and branding, which is valuable for events where polls are running concurrently in many different sessions within PheedLoop. Click on "Compare Plans" on their pricing page to see all the differences.
To create a Slido account, simply click on "Sign Up" on their home page and fill in the basic details.
Step 2 - Create an Event
Before creating your first event, we suggest watching their quick video that helps you get started in 3 minutes. We've embedded it here for your convenience! Note that your implementation on the front-end will look different as you're going to be integrating it into PheedLoop, but all the same basic principles and mechanics apply.
To create your first event, click on the "+ Create Event" button in your dashboard.
Step 3 - Create and Activate a Live Poll
There's much to explore in Slido, and we encourage you to do so, but to stay on course we're going to focus on setting up your first live poll. Navigate to the "Live polls" tab, and create/launch a new multiple choice live poll. Once created, if not already activated by clicking "Launch", click on the green play button to activate the poll. Congrats, you've got your first live poll set up!
Step 4 - Get Slido's Embed Code
We're close to getting your live poll into your PheedLoop session! You need to get your embed code from Slido to do so. In your Slido dashboard, click on Settings > Integrations > Embed Slido, and click on Copy Embed Code.
Step 5 - Embed Slido into a PheedLoop Session
With the Slido embed code in your clipboard, head over to the Sessions module in PheedLoop, and select a session you want to add the poll interface to. The embeddable code is not just for one poll, it's for the whole system in which you can add multiple polls and activate/deactivate them on command via Slido itself. Paste the embed code into the Custom Engage Code field for the session in PheedLoop, and save changes.
Head over to your virtual event portal, open up the session (ensure the stream is enabled for the session, see How to Enable Streams for Virtual Sessions) and you'll see a secondary "Engage" tab above the stream which you can navigate to and experience the integration. It may take a minute or two before the tab shows up, and after that, you're good to go. You can change the word "Enage" if you like to anything else (see Translating Text, Phrases, Buttons and Labels).
That's it, you're good to go! You'll see the results from the poll in your Slido dashboard, and can manage, edit and moderate things from there too. Try creating another poll and flipping which one is active between the two to see the change in real-time in PheedLoop as well.
Multiple Rooms and Concurrent Sessions
The steps above work great for an event with one stream of sessions (i.e. one "Room" in Slido's world), but if you have concurrent sessions, that may not be enough. You'll need Slido's Professional package, and then you can create multiple Rooms within your Slido event, which you can integrate into the different sessions within PheedLoop. For a lot more information on the different ways in which Slido can be embedded within in PheedLoop in more advanced situations, check out their handy guide Embed your Slido event or a poll into a website.