How do I respond to an availability poll?

What is an availability poll?

Before a meeting is on the calendar, a board administrator can send an availability poll — a short list of candidate date/times — to find a slot that works for everyone. You don't need to remember a password or sign in to answer: the poll arrives as an email with a personal link.

As soon as a poll is created, every board member gets that email automatically — there's no separate "send" step. That includes members who were added with a sign-in invitation they haven't accepted yet: answering a poll never requires signing in, so being "Invited" on the roster is no barrier. The email lists the candidate times right in the body (in the poll's time zone) along with the response deadline, so you can check your calendar before you even click through. If you'd rather not get poll invitations by email, turn off the Meetings email under Notification preferences; you can still open Meetings → Availability polls directly to find and answer any open poll.

How do I create a poll? (administrators)

A poll is just a way of scheduling a meeting — you set up everything about the meeting except the time, then let members pick the time. From the Meetings page open Schedule meeting and switch to the Poll members for a time tab (or from Availability polls, choose New poll). Anything you'd already typed on the Set a time tab — title, type, time zone, locations, description — carries over when you switch, and carries back if you change your mind. While a poll is open, the Meetings page shows an open poll chip beside Schedule meeting that links straight to it, so an in-flight poll is never out of sight. Then fill in the same details you would for any meeting:

• Title, meeting type, time zone, location (physical, virtual, or both), and a description — everything except a fixed time. Choosing Committee meeting as the type asks which committee — see Polling one committee below.

• Candidate times — propose at least two date/times for members to choose between, each with an optional end time. Use Add another time for more options and Remove to drop one.

• Schedule automatically when everyone has responded — checked by default. With this on, the moment the last invited member answers, BoardTools picks the time with the most support and turns it straight into a scheduled meeting — nobody has to come back and promote it. Uncheck it if you'd rather review the tally yourself and promote a slot manually (today's behavior).

  Leaving this on reveals two more fields, because a poll that auto-schedules needs a plan for members who never respond:

  • Response deadline — required whenever auto-scheduling is on. If some members still haven't responded by this time, the poll resolves itself one of two ways (see What happens at the response deadline below) instead of waiting forever.
  • Minimum responses to schedule automatically — an advanced, optional override. Leave it blank and BoardTools defaults to a strict majority of invited members; set your own number if you want a different bar.

  About 48 hours before the deadline, anyone who hasn't yet responded gets one reminder email — members who already answered, or who have muted Meetings email, don't get it.

Choose Create poll and you land on the poll's summary, where you'll watch responses come in — and, if you left auto-scheduling on, where you'll see a notice explaining what happens (and when) if not everyone responds in time. Because the poll already carries all the meeting details, promoting the winning time later creates a complete meeting with nothing to re-enter — see Reviewing responses and promoting a slot below.

Polling one committee

A poll can be for a committee rather than the whole board — most useful for exactly the meeting that's hardest to schedule, a small group with four diaries to reconcile. Set the poll's meeting type to Committee meeting and pick the committee; then:

• Only that committee's members are invited to answer. Nobody else on the board gets the email, and nobody else appears on the response roster.
• The "schedule automatically" threshold follows the same, smaller group: the default minimum is a strict majority of the committee's members, not of the board.
• The meeting the winning time becomes is a committee meeting scoped to that committee — its attendance roster and quorum are the committee's members, and its reminders and notices go to the committee only.
• A member added to the board while the poll is open is only invited if they are on that committee — a committee poll never quietly widens into a board-wide one.

The committee is required for a committee-typed poll, and if your board has no committees yet the form links you to the Committees page to create one first. If the committee is deleted while the poll is still open, the poll can no longer be promoted — schedule the meeting directly instead, picking a committee there.

What happens at the response deadline

For an auto-scheduling poll, the response deadline is a firm decision point — BoardTools never leaves a poll waiting forever, but it also never schedules a meeting most members never weighed in on:

• Enough responses (at least the configured minimum) — the poll schedules itself exactly like the "everyone responded" case above: the time with the most support becomes a scheduled meeting, and everyone invited gets the scheduled notice.
• Not enough responses — no meeting is created. You (the poll's creator) get one email with the response tally and a link back to the poll's summary, and the poll stays open for you to promote a slot yourself whenever you're ready, extend the deadline, or close the poll — see Extending the deadline or closing a poll below. You'll also see a notice on the poll's own summary page once this happens.

How do I respond?

1. Open the email and choose the link to respond.
2. For each proposed time, pick your availability:
   • Available — the time works for you.
   • If need be — you could make it work if it's the best option.
   • Unavailable — the time doesn't work.
3. Choose Submit my availability.

Times are shown in the board's own time zone, with the zone named, so everyone is answering about the same moment regardless of where they are.

Good to know

• Your link works once. After you submit, the link is used up — opening it again will say it's no longer valid. That's expected. If you need to change your answer, ask an administrator to send you a fresh link.
• Links expire. A response link is good for a limited time. If yours has timed out, request a new one.
• No account required. Responding never signs you in or creates a session — the link only lets you answer that one poll.

Once responses are in, an administrator reviews them and turns the winning slot into a scheduled meeting — see Scheduling a meeting.

Finding the poll that needs you (administrators)

Meetings → Availability polls lists your board's polls, newest first, with a Status filter (Open / Closed) so you can narrow the list to just the ones still collecting responses — and a "Showing X–Y of N" line and page controls once there are enough to need them. The open poll chip on the Meetings page (see How do I create a poll? above) links straight to the list already filtered to Open, so the count on the chip and the count on the list always agree.

Each row shows enough to tell which ones are on track and which need you, without opening any of them:

• Action needed — a poll shows this badge when its response deadline passed without enough responses to schedule automatically (see What happens at the response deadline above). Open the poll to promote a slot yourself, extend the deadline, or close it.
• Responses due <date> — the response deadline, in the board's own time zone, for any poll that has one. A poll with no deadline (auto-scheduling off) shows no such line.
• Auto-schedule — a poll that will promote itself the moment everyone has responded, or at its deadline, is marked so at a glance; a poll without the marker only promotes when an administrator chooses a slot.
• Once a poll closes into a scheduled meeting, its row links straight to View scheduled meeting — no need to open the poll first.

Reviewing responses and promoting a slot (administrators)

From Meetings → Availability polls, open a poll to see its summary: every candidate time, side by side with how many members answered Available, If need be, and Unavailable, plus a badge stating whether auto-scheduling is on or off for this poll. The time with the most support is called out as Suggested — a starting point, not a decision made for you; promote whichever slot actually works.

Below the tally, the response roster shows every invited member by name, split into two groups so you can see at a glance who to nudge:

• Outstanding — members who haven't answered at all yet.
• Responded — members who have, with their own answer to each candidate time (or No answer for any one time they left blank — a member only has to answer at least one candidate time to count as responded).

Reminding non-responders

While a poll is open, each outstanding member gets a Send reminder button next to their name, and the poll header gets a Nudge everyone who hasn't responded action. Both are organizer-only and both send the same reminder email — a fresh single-use response link that supersedes the earlier one, so the reminder always works even if the original invite has since been forwarded around.

• Send reminder (per member) — sends a single reminder email to that member. Use this to nudge a specific director whose answer you're waiting on, without touching everyone else.
• Nudge everyone who hasn't responded — sends the reminder email to every invited member who hasn't answered yet, in one click. The confirmation dialog names the count so you know exactly how many will get the message.

To avoid an inbox flood, each member can be reminded at most once per 24 hours on a given poll — a second click within the same day is refused with a friendly "already reminded today" toast, and the fan-out simply skips any member who's already been reminded that day (and tells you how many were skipped in its own confirmation). Members who have muted the Meetings email under Notification preferences don't receive the reminder, matching every other poll email.

Every reminder is recorded in the audit log as Availability poll reminder sent, naming the target member — so the governance record shows exactly who was nudged and when.

Late joiners get invited automatically

A member added to the board while a poll is still open is automatically invited to every open poll they're eligible for — the response email lands in their inbox as part of joining the board, so the roster is never "waiting on" someone who was never asked. A member who was previously invited, then removed, then re-added does not get a second invitation — their earlier invitation is still their invitation.

If auto-scheduling is on, you don't have to do anything: as soon as every invited member has responded, BoardTools promotes the suggested time itself — creating the meeting and closing the poll in the same moment the last answer comes in. If some members never respond, the response deadline takes over instead — see What happens at the response deadline above. Either way, you can still promote a different slot yourself at any time before that happens, the same way as below.

Any invited member can open a poll's summary and read the tally and the roster — who has answered, and how. Promote to meeting (like Edit poll, Extend deadline, Close poll and Delete poll) is an organizer action, so it only appears for members who can schedule meetings.

If auto-scheduling is off (or you want to promote before everyone has answered), choose Promote to meeting on the slot you want. This:

• Creates a scheduled meeting at that exact date and time, carrying all the details you entered when you set up the poll — title, meeting type, the committee (for a committee poll), time zone, locations, and description — so there's nothing to re-enter.
• Closes the poll, so it stops accepting responses.
• Emails everyone who was invited to the poll a notice that the meeting is now scheduled, with a link to the meeting page (where they can add it to their calendar) — the same Meetings email preference governs this notice, and the same notice goes out whether the poll was promoted automatically or by hand.

A poll can only be promoted once — if an automatic promotion and a manual one land at nearly the same moment, only the first to complete takes effect; the other simply reports the poll is already scheduled. After promotion, the poll's summary links to the meeting it produced.

Extending the deadline or closing a poll (administrators)

While a poll is still open, its summary page also offers two controls for when the responses on record aren't quite ready for a decision — most useful after the page shows the "response deadline passed" notice, but available any time the poll is open:

• Extend deadline — choose a new date and time for members to respond by. The new deadline must be later than now; if auto-scheduling is on, the poll resumes waiting until then, exactly as it did with the original deadline.
• Close poll — stop accepting responses immediately, without creating a meeting. Use this instead of promoting a slot if the poll shouldn't turn into a meeting at all (for example, the board decided not to meet). Closing is final: a closed poll cannot be reopened, and its summary page then shows it as closed the same way a promoted poll does — the difference is simply that no meeting was created. If you change your mind about a specific time, promote a slot instead — see Reviewing responses and promoting a slot above.

Correcting or deleting a poll (administrators)

A poll set up with the wrong title, deadline, or dates no longer has to be closed and replaced — you can fix it in place, or remove it outright:

• Edit poll — while the poll is open, correct its title, description, and response deadline. The change is reflected right away, including for members who have already responded — there's no separate step to "republish" it.
• Candidate times — also while the poll is open, its summary page lists every proposed time with an Add a candidate time button and a Remove control on each:
  • Adding a time is always safe — a brand-new option starts with zero responses, so nothing already on record is ever affected.
  • Removing a time discards any responses already recorded for it. The confirmation prompt states exactly how many will be discarded before you confirm — for a time nobody has answered yet, it says so instead. A poll always needs at least two candidate times, so Remove is unavailable once only two remain; add another time first.
• Delete poll — permanently removes the poll, its candidate times, and every response recorded on it. This is available from the poll's own summary page and from its row's "⋯" menu on the Availability polls list, behind a confirmation naming the poll and stating what's lost. This cannot be undone. A poll already promoted into a scheduled meeting can't be deleted this way — delete or cancel the meeting itself instead, so the meeting's own record of how it was scheduled is never left dangling.