If you’d like to connect the members of your network or community, then polls are a great way of doing so. Take care to avoid the following don’ts, though.

Don’t make your questions sound too formal.

Stiff questions can put your respondents off. For example, you can use "who" instead of "whom" to make the question more user-friendly. Keep in mind that your poll is a tool that should make your participants feel at ease and willing to share information with you. However, while you can relax your grammar, you should always make sure that your spelling is correct. Bad spelling stands out and will make you appear unprofessional and annoy your respondents.

Don’t ask complicated questions.

Keep things simple. Be sure to ask only one question at a time and arrange them in a logical order. Complex questions, wherein the respondent has to think about more than one situation at the same time, are confusing and likely to be answered wrongly or not at all. Not only do they make it hard to extract the information you’re seeking, they’re also difficult to analyze automatically. Here’s an example of a complex question: If you purchased a new car this year and it was black, which month did you buy it in?

In addition, if your questions do not follow a logical arrangement, your respondents will become confused and/or irritated, neither of which will result in a favorable impression of your organization. Try to group your questions by similar informational categories. Going back and forth between varied categories will make the flow of the poll awkward as well as make the poll seem longer and more intricate than it really is.

Don’t use double negatives and tricky concepts.

Participants like to feel comfortable when responding to polls, so if they have to try to decipher a question, they will abandon the poll. Most people are easily confounded when trying to decode the meaning of a question that uses double negatives. And even if they do answer the question, there’s no telling if the answer they provided was the answer they intended, so your data may be flawed and your analysis of the results may be incorrect. If your poll is too difficult to understand, you’ll get a low completion rate.