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Schedule & Content (Pulse)


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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.

Qtip: Pulses surveys can be sent to everyone, or you can invite participants over a number of pulse surveys to get survey data from a sample of your population each survey. When using participant sampling, each pulse survey is sent to participants in roughly equal batches, until everyone who is eligible to receive the pulse has been invited.
  1. Go to Schedule and content.
    Program schedule section of schedule and content tab
  2. Go to the Program schedule section.
  3. Select how often you want to send pulses out. You can choose from every week, every 2 weeks, or every month.
  4. 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.
  5. Choose the time of day.
  6. Choose the timezone.
  7. Select the end date of the first survey.
    Setting the program schedule

    Qtip: After surveys are sent, participants have until the survey end date to access them.
  8. Select the time the survey should end on the last day.
  9. 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.
  10. If you chose to invite participants gradually over a number of surveys, you’ll have a few more steps:
    Setting a sampling schedule

    • 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.
  11. Click Save.
Qtip: If you chose to invite participants gradually over a number of surveys, you need to set sampling criteria.

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 a running schedule; the program will continue to add more pulse surveys automatically as time goes on.

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.

editing existing program schedules; next to each launch date, there's 3 dots you can click to make changes
To do this, click Adjust Schedule.

new window named adjust the survey schedule

You’ll see a preview of your start date and sample dates based on your selections.

Qtip: After starting your program, surveys that are skipped within 1 month of today can’t be un-skipped. Skipped surveys within 1 month of launch will be permanently deleted.

Survey Template

Here, you can edit your pulse’s core questions. These are the questions that will be asked in each of your pulses.

Qtip: It’s safe to edit the survey template at any time. Changes to core questions will only affect pulses that are created after edits, and will not invalidate previous pulses’ data or changes that were made in existing pulse projects.

survey template section, edit button

To edit core questions, click Edit.

survey builder that opens when you edit the template

Qtip: Not sure where to start? We have questions designed for pulses in our question library.
Qtip: Do you need to add unique questions to a survey, perhaps for a one-off event? You can edit individual surveys on the Overview tab.

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.

Base language in the translations section

Question Behavior

Pulses are only compatible with the following question behavior:

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

 

Distribution Templates

You can set a message template for your pulse’s invitation and the reminder. You can also create messages in your library that can be used as message templates for your pulse program. Pulse supports both email and SMS (text message) distributions.

See Distribution Templates.

See Shareable Links.