Pull Polling
Traditional polling instruments, “horse-race” polls in particular, have significant limitations in determining preferences and consensuses amongst the groups being polled. The lack of any information regarding the certainty or importance of a choice makes it impossible to compare or correlate different polls, the limited number of choices available and choices to be selected can hide significant sentiment groups, and the bias inherent in the selection of polling questions means that there will always be some degree of “push” in traditional polls. In addition, lacking this information, the data is very sparse and provides no insight into why the poll subjects answer the way they do. These shortcomings are accepted as there is currently no alternative available.
Pull polling is an attempt to provide an option which doesn’t have these shortcomings. Instead of the polls “pushing” subjects into restricted categories and treating all answers in the same “box” as having the same weight, it allows the person being polled to “pull” the poll to record what is important to them. This is accomplished using a flexible and dynamic polling instrument. Flexibility, in this sense, means that participants would enter not just their preferences, but also the strength of the preference, how important it is to them, and their willingness to reconsider it. A pull poll is dynamic as the user can also add options if their choices are not available which will then be presented to those taking the poll later. Thus the poll becomes both broader and more detailed as more people participate, providing a tool to identify areas of importance, consensus, and potential for change.
One of the important principles in pull polling is that it “reverses the polarity”, so to speak. It is a tool designed to help leaders be more responsive to the group, to help individuals better express their positions on what is important to them, and to help the community identify consensus. As such, it will be most useful not in a “one-off” anonymous poll, but rather as a continually evolving database of responses from a community — where a person’s responses to different polls could be connected and someone could update their responses to a poll if their thinking changed. The idea is to take the power out of the hands of the leaders and the pollsters and put it into the hands of the group. The pollsters can’t control the framing because it grows organically, and the leaders are being told what is really important to the group rather than getting information on how to design soundbites to build their cult of personality. It is a methodology for collecting data about the group for the benefit of both the group and the individuals that comprise it.