Run a live poll without slowing down the show

Live questions often happen mid-segment, when stopping to type in chat would break the conversation. Replies then arrive at different speeds and disappear into the feed. It is easy to end up reading the first three messages rather than getting a useful view of the room.

A HeatCheck poll gives everyone the same one-tap question and counts every response equally. You can ask it without leaving the show, watch the result form, and have a clear number to read out thirty seconds after you asked. Because everyone answers with the same choices or scale, you do not have to translate a moving chat thread into a result while you are also hosting.

Choose the right poll format

• Multiple choice — two to six options, each up to 80 characters. Results show each option’s share of the vote. Use it for a decision: which guest to book, which topic to run next, or which of two arguments the room agrees with.
• Rating, 1 to 10 — the same scale the interest meter uses. The result shows a running average and response count. Use it for a degree: how confident the room is, how good that film actually was, or how much listeners want a subject revisited.

Questions can be up to 200 characters, giving you room to be specific while keeping them short enough to read aloud. Prepare up to 200 polls per show before you go live, or add more while the show is running. They stay in a private queue until you launch them.

Launch, close, and reveal

Choose Start poll beside a queued question and it appears on every listener’s page beside the interest slider. The slider keeps running. Results update live on your dashboard and on any overlay that includes the poll, so you can follow the answer before responding to it.

Choose Close & reveal to save the final result and show it on listeners’ screens for 45 seconds. It then clears itself. Use that window to read the result while the question is still current. If you opened a poll by mistake, Cancel removes it without a reveal.

Every poll closed normally is kept under Closed polls on your dashboard, where you can expand one and read the result again, and they appear in your show analytics afterwards. A poll still open when the show ends is settled and saved rather than discarded, keeping the show history complete.

Start with a pre-show poll

Launch a poll before the show goes live and your public page switches to a poll-only view. The interest gauge stays offline. Early listeners can answer the question instead of only watching the countdown, and the same poll carries into the live show without resetting when you start.

This gives the ten minutes before a show a useful first interaction for the committed listeners who are already there.

Put the result on stream

Add the running poll and its results as a widget on a stream overlay, so viewers can see the question and bars fill without opening your page. The overlay is a browser source, so it works in OBS, Streamlabs and anything else that renders a URL.

A listener with an account also earns one point toward their roll call standing, which is credited through their check-in. The poll response remains anonymous: the answer is never attached to the listener or to the point they earn.