Schedule & Content (Pulse)
About Pulse Schedule and Content
In the Schedule and content tab, you can determine the schedule of your pulse surveys, the survey questions that should be asked every time, the messages you’d like to include with each pulse, and the shareable link for the pulse program.
Program Schedule
Select how often you want to send pulses to your participants.
- Go to Schedule and content.
- Go to the Program schedule section.
- Select how often you want to send pulses out. You can choose from every week, every 2 weeks, or every month.
- Decide when to send the first survey.
Qtip: You must choose a date at least 5 days from today. This gives time for participants to be added to the pulse survey before it is distributed.
- Choose the time of day.
- Choose the timezone.
- Select the end date of the first survey.
Qtip: After surveys are sent, participants have until the survey end date to access them. - Select the time the survey should end on the last day.
- Select a Sampling schedule. Determine whether you want to send invites to all program participants every time.
- Yes: Invite all program participants to every pulse. You will not need to set any additional sampling settings.
- No, invite participants gradually over a number of surveys: Sample a selection of your participants every time the survey goes out.
- If you chose to invite participants gradually over a number of surveys, you’ll have a few more steps:
- Choose the number of surveys to be sent.
Qtip: You’ll see an estimate of when all participants will have been invited to the survey. The invite process will repeat on the cadence you chose in step 3.
- Choose what happens when you skip a survey.
- If you want to keep the same end date, all participants will still be surveyed by your chosen end date. The participants per survey will be recalculated to reflect this.
- If you want to delay the end date, the participants per survey will be kept the same. Instead, the end date will be moved further into the future to accommodate how long it’ll take to survey every participant.
- Choose the number of surveys to be sent.
- Click Save and generate.
Changing Schedules and Skipping Surveys
Once you generate your program schedule, you’ll see the surveys and their schedule for the next 52 weeks (one year).
This is also where you can change the schedule for individual surveys, or skip them. This can be useful to avoid company holidays or other dates that could be inconvenient for your employees.
To do this, click Adjust Schedule.
- Skip it: Skip the survey. Whether this adjusts your sampling settings or ultimate end date is dependent on how you configured your program schedule.
- Move the start date and time and end date and time: Adjust dates and times as needed. Your time zone matches what you selected during program schedule configuration.
Survey Template
Here, you can edit your pulse’s core questions. These are the questions that will be asked in each of your pulses.
To edit core questions, click Edit.
Features Available in Pulse Surveys
A pulse’s survey builder works just like it does in any other project.
Available Questions
Pulses are not compatible with any other types of questions.
Available Survey Options
For the most part, the survey options in the pulse are the same as other Employee Experience projects’ survey options. These are the only differences:
- There is no “Use anonymous link” option in the survey template, but that’s because anonymous links can be generated using the shareable links program setting.
- The Base Language is configured in the Translations tab instead of the survey options.
Question Behavior
Pulses are only compatible with the following question behavior:
- Display logic
- Skip logic
- Choice randomization / Randomization
- Recode values
- Default choices
- JavaScript
- Add Note
- Add Choice Group
Pulses are not compatible with carry forward choices or scoring.
Survey Tools and Survey Flow
Pulses have the same survey tools as other Employee Experience projects. If your brand has enabled usage tags, you’ll see a “survey tagging” option.
Pulses have the same survey flow functionality as other Employee Experience projects.
Warning: The following are reserved field names. You should not use these names for embedded data.
- projectStartDate
- ProjectStartDate
- Project Start Date
Message Template
You can set a message template for the survey invitation and the reminder. You can also create messages in your library that can be used as message templates for your pulse program.
Compatible message types:
- Subject lines are compatible with Employee 360 and Employee Experience “Subject Line” messages
- Invites are compatible with Employee 360 and Employee Experience “Evaluator / Participant Invite” messages
- Reminders are compatible with Employee 360 and Employee Experience “Evaluator / Participant Reminder” messages
- Go to Schedule and content.
- Open Message template.
- Click Create a message template.
- Set a From name. This can be anything.
- Set a From email. You can only choose from approved domains, but the username can be whatever you want.
- Add a Reply-to email. This is the email that will receive messages if participants reply to the invite. This can be set to whatever email address you want.
Qtip: You can also choose email addresses to CC or BCC on replies.
- Write a subject line, or select one from the library using the book icon.
- Write a message, or select one from the library using the book icon in the message editor.
Qtip: You can include a pulse survey question right inside your invite by clicking the inline email question icon ( [?] ).Qtip: You can test out your email by clicking Send a test message in the email message editor. Be careful to not forward the preview email on to your participants as it contains the preview survey link instead of the individual link. Preview survey links will always be active, regardless of whether or not a survey is closed. For more information about these link types, visit the Preview Survey page. Please note that piped text will not populate for preview emails.
- Click Next.
- Review your changes. You can click Edit if you want to change anything.
- If you want to add a reminder, click Add reminder.
- Set up your reminder message.
- Click Next.
- Choose how long after the initial invite that you’d like to send the reminder.
- Click Next.
- You can add more reminders or make edits to messages as needed. When you’re done, select Save.
You can edit or delete your invite or reminder(s) any time.
Shareable Links
See Shareable Links.