With the Open Ended question type, participants can type in free-text answers. This question type is good to use when you don't want to use pre-determined answers and want voters to write longer answers – up to 200 characters at a time.

Since participants can input anything, you can use this question to collect emails or other information to identify voters. It is also great for letting the audience send in their own questions to the speaker.

Pro tip: Let participants have a bit more time to enter their statements.

This is how you can create an Open Ended question with Mentimeter:

You can change the results layout under the "Design" tab. The options are:

The Speech bubbles layout will display multiple responses on the slide. If you get more responses than fit the slide, you can scroll down the slide in the Presentation view to see more responses.

The Flowing grid layout works just like the Speech bubbles layout, but the slide will automatically scroll down as you get more responses.

You can see a preview of the layouts when you create your question – just hover over the different options to see how they will look. You can also change the layout of the responses while presenting by opening the Presentation menu (hover over the bottom left corner of the screen) and selecting the "Show layout" button from the left-side toolbar:

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To avoid inappropriate words, you can use the profanity filter to remove them from your audience's input. You can activate the profanity filter from the Settings menu in the presentation's edit view:
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Each Open ended response allows for max 200 characters, but if your participants want to add more input they can submit several responses. The option to submit several responses is turned on by default. If you want to turn this option off, you can select the “Interactivity” tab and toggle “Multiple responses per person”.

You can also use Open Ended slides to hold brainstorming sessions with your audience. Participants can submit their answers normally, then they can vote on each other's submissions.

To activate this feature, simply check “Vote on Responses” within the “Interactivity” tab (and change the number of votes, if you wish):
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You can choose how many votes each user can submit and whether or not those votes need to be on different options:

Once participants have submitted their responses, you can start the voting by pressing Enter or by clicking this button:

Note that if you have enabled voting on responses on an Open Ended slide, you will not be able to set the presentation to Audience pace. Learn more about presentation pacing here.

In case your audience enters undesired words that haven't been captured by our profanity filter, or you simply want to remove addressed input or tidy up the results before exporting to PDF, you can remove input from Word Clouds and Open Ended questions. This can be done either in the Mentimote or directly on your presentation screen. Find out how to do it here.