A group poll without an account, and without an email

Thirty people, one link. Some of them are colleagues, some are friends of friends, and some you have never met. Half of them will open it on a phone, standing in a queue, with about ten seconds of patience.

Whatever that link asks for, you are the one asking. If it opens on a sign-up form, you have just asked thirty people for a password they will reuse badly and a mailbox they did not offer. Most of them will close the tab and tell you their dates in the group chat instead, which puts you back where you started: counting messages by hand.

So the useful question is not whether group scheduling needs an account. It is exactly what a poll asks of each person, and what you give up when it asks for nothing.

1. 1

   A title, and at least one date

   That is the whole requirement. Three to five dates work better than one, but nothing stops you at one. The type you pick (“Date”, “Time slot” or “Period”) changes what people tick, not what they are asked to give.

2. 2

   Your email, only if you want to be told

   The field is optional. It becomes required only if you tick the box asking to be kept informed, because that is the thing it is for: sending you your Pollendar links. It is never shared with third parties.

3. 3

   One decision about your participants

   At creation there is an option: “Ask participants for their email to add them to your calendar event.” Leave it off and a name is all anyone has to type. Turn it on and read the next two sections first.

No account, no password, no paid plan to decline. The poll exists as soon as you create it, and what you get back is a link. That link is the poll: you paste it in a group chat, a thread, an email, or you send invitations by email from the poll itself, twenty addresses at a time.

Someone opens your link. They see your dates and, if other people have already answered, the table filling up. Three things happen, and only three.

That is the entire transaction. Nobody signs up, nobody picks a password, nobody installs anything. A participant who arrives on a borrowed phone can answer and hand it back. If you want the longer version of how the answers then stack up, the overview of the results table covers it.

Asking for nothing is the setting that gets answers from thirty people. It is not free, though, and the two things it costs you are worth knowing before you choose.

• You gain the people who hesitate. An email field in front of a casual yes-or-no question filters out exactly the participants you were least sure of: the ones at the edge of the group, the ones in a hurry, the ones who are careful with their address. With thirty invitees, that is the difference between twenty-two answers and twelve.
• You lose the invitation. Everyone can still add the chosen date to their own calendar from the highlighted rows, as an iCalendar file, in Google Calendar or in Outlook Web. What you cannot do is have the calendar event invite the people who said yes, because you have no address to invite them at. You send one message with the date instead.
• You lose the ability to tell two people apart. Names are typed by hand, so in a group of thirty, two Thomas are near-certain and you will not know which column belongs to which. Ask for a first name and an initial in the message you send with the link; it costs nothing and it saves the table.

A middle road exists and it is usually the right one. Run the poll asking for nothing, let the dates settle, then collect addresses only from the people you actually need in the calendar event, which, for a dinner or a five-a-side game, is nobody at all.

No, and it should not be. The table only works because every column has a name on it: you need to see that Clara said no to the 12th and that Sam has not made up their mind about the 19th. A board of unnamed columns tells you a score and nothing you can act on.

So treat the names as public to the group. They are typed by the participants themselves, which means someone can answer as “a colleague from the second floor” if they want to. But then you cannot chase them for the dates they skipped, and that is the trade they made, not the one you offered.

Anyone who has the link. There is no guest list to maintain, no invitation to accept, no sign-in standing between a stranger and your dates, which is exactly why the thirty people answer, and exactly what you have to keep in mind. The link is the permission. A poll is not a secret.

In practice that is the same discipline as a shared document: fine in a group chat, fine in an email to a class or a team, worth a second thought before a public post. If someone lands in the table who should not be there, you can remove that participant and the row scores recalculate without them.

The same logic covers chasing people. There is no automatic reminder and no closing date to set, so the nudge is manual and it is better for it: announce when you intend to decide at the same time as you send the link, then post the link once more the day before. Two messages, and you know who is simply unreachable rather than undecided.

One thing: finding your own polls again from another device. You create on a laptop, you open the list on your phone, they are there. That is the whole feature, and it is strictly optional: polls created without it behave identically, collect answers identically, and show the same table.

Skip it and your poll lives at its link, so keep that link somewhere you will find it again: a pinned message, a note, the thread where you shared it. Ticking the box that asks for your email covers the same ground from the other direction, since what that address is used for is sending your links back to you.