How to add a poll or survey to SharePoint

Asking a question is the easy part. Getting enough people to answer that the result means anything is the hard part, and it is almost entirely a function of how much effort you ask for. SharePoint Online has no poll web part, so most intranets fall back on an embedded form or a survey list - and response rates suffer for reasons that have nothing to do with the question. This guide covers the native options, where each one loses people, and how to put a poll or a pulse survey on a page that people answer in passing.

What Microsoft 365 gives you natively

• Microsoft Forms - genuinely capable, free with your licence, and the right answer for a long questionnaire. It can be embedded in a page.
• A SharePoint survey list - a classic feature that still exists, stores responses in SharePoint, and looks it.
• Viva Engage polls - quick and social, if your organisation has adopted Engage and people are in it.
• Viva Glint / Pulse - a real engagement platform for real engagement surveys, at a real price and a licence tier most SMBs do not have.

Where they fall short on an intranet page

• An embedded Form is a page within a page. It carries its own styling, ignores your theme, and gets its own scrollbar. On a designed homepage it reads as a foreign object, and every visual seam costs you responses.
• The results live somewhere else. Forms reports open in Forms. To show your organisation what it said, someone exports, charts it in Excel or PowerPoint, and pastes a picture that is out of date the moment it is published.
• Survey lists look like 2010. Responses land in SharePoint, which is right, but the answering experience is a multi-page list form and the results are a bar chart nobody would put on a homepage.
• Anonymity gets promised loosely. This is the one to watch. If responses are stored in SharePoint, SharePoint records who created each item - so "anonymous" is at best "we do not show you the names". Telling people a survey is anonymous when an administrator can read the list is a trust problem waiting to be discovered.
• Nothing supports the small, frequent question. Every native route is built for a questionnaire. Almost nobody opens a questionnaire to answer one thing, so the light weekly question - the kind that actually keeps an intranet alive - never gets asked.

The supported way: a poll web part that answers and reports on the page

The right approach is a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part that stores responses in ordinary SharePoint lists on your own site, renders the question inside your page rather than in an iframe, and shows the results as a designed panel that updates itself - reading and writing client-side as the signed-in user.

This is what Glow Cloud Kit Pulse does. It is two web parts in one install: Quick Poll for a single question on a homepage, and Pulse for a full multi-question survey with its own results dashboard. Six question types - choice, agreement scale, NPS, star rating, ranking and free text - built in a visual editor with no JSON and no list to set up first. Results are designed to be read: shares with bars, a real NPS split into promoters and detractors, a word cloud of themes in written answers, participation trends, and a table view for accessibility. It uses no Microsoft Graph permissions at all.

On the anonymity question it takes the honest line rather than the flattering one: responses live in a SharePoint list in your tenant, ordinary users can read only their own, administrators can read them all as they could with any list, and everyone else sees published totals - and the web part says so on the page before anyone answers.

A checklist for polls people actually answer

1. Put the question where people already are. A poll on the homepage beats a survey behind a link, every time.
2. Ask for one thing when you only need one thing. Save the questionnaire for when you genuinely need a questionnaire.
3. Show the result immediately. Answering and seeing where you sit is most of the reward.
4. Let people change their vote, and let them see results before answering. Both raise participation rather than corrupting it.
5. Be precise about who can see what, and put it in front of them. Vague anonymity claims produce cautious answers; a clear statement produces honest ones.
6. Publish what you found, and what you changed because of it. Nothing kills the next survey faster than silence after the last one.

Related

• Glow Cloud Kit Pulse - the product overview.
• Pulse setup guide - install, question types and the storage model.
• How to add an announcement banner to SharePoint.