Poll your community before you commit to a date

Picking a date before you know who's free is a common way offkais stall out. A planning poll lets you float a few candidate dates (or a whole time window) to your community, see where the overlap is, and only then create the event — pre-filled with the date people actually chose.

Create one at Host → Polls → New poll. You'll set a title, description, an optional cover image (same uploader as event covers, drag to reposition), a timezone (candidate dates and times display in this timezone for every voter, regardless of their own), and an optional close date.

You can add up to 20 candidate dates and up to 5 optional questions — venue, budget, whatever else you need an answer on. Questions come in four types: single choice, multi-choice, dropdown (single choice shown as a compact select, handy for long option lists), and short answer (voters type a free-text reply). Choice questions take up to 12 options each, and any question can carry its own image.

Beyond the cover you can also attach up to 6 images to the poll — useful when you're asking people to choose between designs, venues, or menu items they need to actually see.

Specific dates is the default: list exact candidate datetimes, and voters mark each one Yes / Maybe / No.

If your timing is flexible rather than a short list of fixed options, switch the poll to Schedule Heatmap instead. You pick candidate days plus a daily time window (say, 5 PM–11 PM), and voters paint the 30-minute slots they can make across those days — like a shared availability grid. Results render as a density grid where darker cells mean more people are free; click the busiest cell to convert straight into an event at that exact day and time.

If you narrow a heatmap's time window after people have already voted, any painted slots that fall outside the new window are removed. Voters see only the current window, so nothing gets stranded behind the scenes.

A Public poll toggle lists it on Discover, where it renders as a card badged "Poll" alongside events. Leave it off and the poll is unlisted — reachable only by the share link. Unlisted polls aren't browsable or readable anonymously: viewers must sign in to see the content, even if they have the exact URL.

Responding requires an Offkai account — this keeps results meaningful and lets you notify people afterward. A voter marks their availability (or paints heatmap slots), answers your questions, and can come back and change their answers anytime while the poll is open. They can also tick "Notify me if this becomes an event."

Your poll's manage page shows live results — per-date Yes/Maybe tallies with a top pick (or the heatmap density grid), plus per-option counts for your questions. You also get a voter list, similar to an event's interested list, so you can see exactly who has responded. Individual answers themselves stay aggregated — the roster tells you who voted, not how any one person answered.

While the poll is open, you'll get at most one email digest a day summarizing responses — and only on days when there are new votes since the last digest, so an idle poll won't keep emailing you.

Close a poll manually anytime, or set a close date and let it happen automatically. A closed poll can be reopened if you change your mind. Closing freezes voting and makes results publicly visible on the poll page, even to people who haven't voted.

Convert to event from the manage page — or any date's "Convert with this date" link, or a specific cell on the heatmap grid — lands you on the normal create-event form, pre-filled with the winning date, title, description, timezone, and cover image. Adjust anything you like, then publish as usual or save it as a draft. If you save a draft, the notifications below wait until you actually publish.

Everyone who ticked "Notify me" gets an in-app notification and a summary email (event name, date & time, location, price) with an RSVP link, and is automatically added to the event as Interested — from there they show up in the event's interested list and get the same interested-flow notifications as anyone else.

Once converted, the poll's share link automatically forwards to the event page — any link you already shared (Discord, group chats, wherever) keeps working without you having to update it.

If you later delete that event, the poll doesn't just die with it: it automatically reopens for voting, exactly as it was before conversion, and the share link falls back to serving the poll again instead of a broken page. You're free to pick a new date and convert again whenever you're ready.

If you re-convert to a new event within 24 hours of the original notification, everyone who opted in is still added to the new event as Interested — but they won't get a second notification email so soon after the first. Past that 24-hour window, a re-conversion notifies them again as normal.

Polls are free and don't require Stripe or any payment setup.

• Creating and publishing the resulting event → Hosting guide
• How ticket payments work once an event goes live → How payments work on Offkai