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Sampling Settings (Pulse)

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About Sampling Settings

Once you’ve uploaded participants to your pulse, you can choose to sample them. Sampling lets you distribute surveys to a subset of your participants each pulse. One of the benefits of sampling is that you can avoid survey fatigue from your employee population, especially if you send pulses on a fairly regular basis.

You have 2 different kinds of sampling to choose from: random sampling and sampling based on metadata (stratified sampling).

Qtip: You cannot use metadata that was used to build a hierarchy to also sample your participants. For example, fields like manager ID and unique ID in a parent-child hierarchy cannot be used in sampling.

How Sampled Participants are Chosen

Qtip: Sampling automatically occurs 3 days before your project is scheduled to be distributed.

Participant sampling is based on 2 inputs, which are covered in 2 distinct settings menus:

  1. The number of participants in each pulse survey, which is determined based on the Sampling Schedule in Program Schedule settings. This setting determines the number of pulse surveys that will be sent before surveying all of your program participants. For example, if you have a program participant list of 100 people and choose to survey everyone over 4 surveys, then about 25 participants will be in each survey.
  2. The method of selecting the participants for each pulse survey. The method used to select participants is found in the participant Sampling Settings section and comes with 2 choices: Random Sampling or Sampling proportionally based on metadata.

Random Sampling

As implied by the name, sampled participants are chosen at random.

Example: You have 900 participants. You are sending a survey every month. You have set it so that every participant should receive the survey every 3 months.

Program schedule with survey schedule set to every month
Program schedule with sampling schedule set to 3 surveys

That means that every month, 300 participants will be chosen at random, since 900 / 3 = 300.
Sampling settings showing 300 participants will be sampled randomly every month

Sampling based on metadata

Participants are chosen from every value of the chosen metadata on the chosen timeframe.

For example, if you choose to send a pulse every week for the “Department” field, then participants are chosen from every department every week proportionally based on the percentage of participants in each department.

If you choose to send a pulse every month for the “Department” and “Country” fields, then participants are chosen from all combinations of every department and every country every month, based on the percentage of participants in each department and country combination.

Example: You have 900 participants. You are sending a survey every month. You have set it so that every participant should receive the survey every 3 months.

Program schedule with survey schedule set to every month
Program schedule with sampling schedule set to 3 surveys

Since 900 / 3 = 300, then 300 participants will be chosen every month. These participants will be chosen proportionally from all combinations of every country and every department.
Select proportionally based on metadata country and department

The number of countries and departments in your organization does not factor into the total number of participants receiving distributions every month.

Qtip: If all participants from the chosen metadata field (e.g., Department) are selected before the all participants are surveyed, then that department will not be represented in the remaining surveys.
Warning: If the number of unique metadata groups is greater than the number of participants in your sample, then participants will be unable to be sampled. For example, if the total number of departments represented in your program participant list is 20 and the number of participants in each sample is 10, then it is not possible to select a sample that will be representative of all 20 departments.

Setting Up Sampling

numbered steps to create a sample

  1. Go to Participants and sampling.
  2. Select Sampling settings.
  3. Choose between the following:
    • Select randomly from all participants
    • Select proportionally based on metadata
  4. If you chose to base your sampling on metadata, select your metadata.
  5. Use the dropdown and select Insert condition below to add another metadata. You can only have 2 metadata total.
    Qtip: You can use the dropdown to the right of a metadata to remove it.
  6. Click Save.
Qtip: Once you’ve completed your sampling settings, you can launch your pulse.

FAQs