Making sure we can identify your members

RollCall Live matches the people in your Zoom meeting against the roster you upload. It matches on email address first, and falls back to an exact name match. That's deliberate — for a vote, guessing is worse than asking.

The catch is that Zoom does not always tell an app the participant's email address. This page explains when it does, so you can pick the setup that fits your meeting.

When Zoom gives us an email address

Zoom's privacy rules mean the email is hidden for "guest" participants — anyone not on your own Zoom account — unless one of these applies. Any one of them is enough, and all of them work with RollCall Live with no extra setup on our side.

Option 1 — Invite members from your calendar (easiest for small boards)

If you schedule the meeting through Zoom's Outlook or Google Calendar integration and invite members by email, Zoom already knows who they are. Best option for a board of 5–20 where you're sending invitations anyway.

Option 2 — Authentication exception list (best for a known membership roll)

In your meeting settings, switch on Only authenticated users can join, then use Allow authentication exception to add your members' email addresses. Each person receives their own join link, and their email reaches us when they join.

This is usually the best fit for an AGM: you already have those email addresses in your roster, nobody has to fill in a form, and it doubles as access control — only people on the membership roll can get into the meeting at all.

Option 3 — Require registration

Turn on registration for the meeting. Members enter their name and email once, and Zoom passes the email to us when they join. Reliable, and useful if you want a record of who signed up in advance — but it does add a step for attendees, and people who register with a different address than the one on your roster will still come through as unmatched.

Option 4 — Webinar format

If you run your AGM as a Zoom Webinar, panelists and attendees imported by CSV come through with their email addresses.

If you do none of these

Everything still works — we simply fall back to matching on the display name. Anyone whose Zoom name exactly matches a roster name is classified automatically. Everyone else lands in the Unmatched tile, where the board suggests likely matches for you to confirm (see below). For a small, regular meeting where members join with their real names, this is often perfectly fine.

Use a waiting room — it's your identity checkpoint

We strongly recommend turning on the Zoom waiting room for any meeting where the roll matters.

The waiting room is where "Cathy's iPad" gets sorted out before it becomes a problem on your board. When someone appears with a device name, a phone number, or a nickname you don't recognise:

  • Ask them to rename themselves before you admit them. In the waiting room you can message a participant, or simply hold them there until they fix their name. As host you can also rename anyone directly in the Zoom participant list — that's the fastest fix, and RollCall picks up the corrected name automatically.
  • Admit people in batches rather than all at once, so you can keep pace with the board.
  • Park anyone questionable. If you're unsure who someone is, leave them in the waiting room until you've confirmed. They cannot affect quorum from there.

If someone has already been admitted and you still can't identify them, move them into a breakout room to ask privately, without holding up the meeting. Participants in a breakout room are still on the call and still counted, so use the waiting room for genuine identity doubt and the breakout room for a quiet conversation.

A practical setup for a contested AGM: waiting room on, one person handling admissions, and the RollCall board on a second screen so you can see each person land as you admit them.

Suggested matches

When somebody can't be matched exactly, the board doesn't just give up. Underneath their name you may see something like:

Is this Cindy Copeland? Voter — same name in a different order  [Confirm]

Tap Confirm and they're classified, exactly as if you'd edited them by hand — and the change is recorded in the attendance log like any other correction.

Suggestions cover the everyday cases: reversed names ("Copeland, Cindy"), extra bits Zoom users add ("(Host)", "(she/her)", "on iPhone", "Cathy's iPad"), differences in punctuation, capitalisation or accents ("Renee" vs "Renée"), a first initial with a surname ("M. Chen"), and a surname on its own when only one person on your roster has it.

A suggestion never applies itself. Nobody's category changes, and no count moves, until you confirm it. If a guess would be ambiguous — two Smiths on the roster and someone called "J. Smith" — we deliberately say nothing rather than risk giving the wrong person a vote.

Add nicknames to your roster

If members reliably join under a different name than the one on your official roll, add an Aliases column to your roster CSV (we also recognise "AKA", "Nickname", "Also known as", and "Maiden name"). Separate multiple entries with a semicolon:

Name,Email,Role,Aliases
Margaret Chen,meg@example.com,Voter,Meg Chen; Maggie
Robert Ellis,rob@example.com,Voter,Bob Ellis

Aliases are matched exactly, just like the main name — so "Meg Chen" is classified straight away, with no confirmation needed. Adding the two or three regulars who always join as something different is usually a five-minute job that pays off at every meeting.

Quick checklist before an important vote

  • Roster uploaded, with emails wherever you have them
  • One of options 1–4 above enabled, if you need automatic email matching
  • Waiting room on, with someone watching it
  • Meeting notice asks members to join with their full name as it appears on the membership roll
  • Unmatched tile at zero before the vote is called — confirm suggestions and assign anyone remaining
  • Freeze the roll the moment the vote is called

Still stuck? Email jp@dataonthespot.com and we'll help you work out the right setup for your meeting.