At Automattic we try to be as transparent, collaborative, and democratic as possible, which is why we recently used Polldaddy to decide where to have our next team meeting. Our team had four potential locations to choose from, and to ensure everyone had an equal say we used a preferential voting system: the Polldaddy ranked survey.
When you create a survey with Polldaddy you can select from a number of question types, and one of these is the rank type. This allows participants to arrange choices in order of preference by dragging and dropping them into the desired position.
What result did we end up with? The ranked survey orders items according to a weighted rank. This is calculated as the sum of the position multiplied by the count for each choice, and then divided by the total number of responses. Here are the results:
As you can see from our results, Madrid is the winner. The detailed data shows us that three people put Madrid in first place, one person put it second, four people put it third, and one person put it last. Adding these values to the formula gives us this:
weighted rank = ((1 * 3) + (2 * 1) + (3 * 4) + (4 * 1)) / 9 = 21/9 = 2.33
Edinburgh was also ranked first by three participants, but it came last because five people ranked that option as least favored.
The ranked survey is a useful tool when trying to decide between a number of options, or for ranking options in order of importance. Use it as a way for employees to rank benefits according to importance, or allow your clients to rank which feature they’d most like to see implemented next, or even where to go for the next family holiday. To learn more about ranked surveys please see our support guide.
