Whether you are electing your next president or selecting your team’s best ideas, voting is always a delicate matter. The way you formulate your question and how you collect the answers strongly influence the outcome and results of the vote.
Different kind of tactics are involved when casting a vote: while some participants will immediately select their own ideas, others will wait to see how their peers vote to make up their mind. Group biases have a particularly strong impact when relations of authority and hierarchy are unbalanced.
In this article, we will talk about four types of voting systems using Stormz which will enable you to organize a vote sequence suited to your goals. With Stormz, votes are anonymously casted from a tablet or smartphone and can be asynchronous. Results are published at the end.
Voting with Stormz
Once you’ve identified, in a collaborative way if you wish, the suggestions and questions to submit to the participants, three steps are needed to design your vote sequence on Stormz : the settings, the vote and the results.
Configure the vote from your workshop’s settings by taking into account two possible constraints:
- the budget limit, or how many points each participant has at its disposal.
- the card limit, or how many points a participant can cast on a single card or cluster. These are the two main criterias which you may adjust according to your own needs.
Initiate the vote accessible for all participants from their tablet or smartphone. Its duration might vary due to different factors (number of suggestions, settings, etc.). You can either choose to show the results as the participants cast their votes or hide them until the end.
Show the results of the vote in the shape of a bar chart displayed on a large screen or on participants’ tablets and smartphones.
Voting with a budget
Whether you are choosing a leader or deciding on the next step of your action plan, voting enables you to choose one or several options out of many possibilities. There are two main ways to vote with Stormz using the budget limit.
The Top 3 - Elect the best options
Every participant will credit one point to the best contributions. Those who received the highest scores are selected. For instance, you can distribute a 3-point budget for a Top 3 or a single point in the event of an election.
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The $100 - Select the best options
Every participant will receive 100$ that they will have to allocate between one or several cards. The budgetary aspect makes the voting more realistic and gives participants much more leeway. You can also adjust the budget to the issue at hand and the voting context.
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Voting with a card limit
You can also vote to decide whether the contributions are valid or not by giving them a certain amount of points. In this case, the vote settings will be adjusted according to a card limit and the budget will be deactivated.
Like/Dislike - Show your opinion
For or against, Like / Dislike, +1/-1… regardless of its appellation, the ternary vote will put the participants in front of three options: approval, neutrality, disagreement. While neutrality is often linked to abstention, disagreement can neutralize the repute bias.
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Score Voting - Weigh your support
Every participant will use a predefined scale, from -10 to 10 or 0 to 20 for example, to give his approval or express his disagreement with much more nuance. Academic assessments or figure skating juries often use such patterns.
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As a result, you will get a grand total. If you’d rather get an average mark or use several criteria, we advise you to use the ratings!