Manually Adding Participants to Pulse Surveys

Suite
Employee Experience
Product
Qualtrics
What's on this page

About Manually Adding Pulse Participants

In addition to randomly sampling from a larger pool of program participants, you can decide to manually select the participants you want to include in each survey of your pulse. You still start by creating a larger pool of program participants, then select from those participants in each survey. You can use metadata to speed up the selection process, or you can choose specific individuals.

This method of adding participants can also be called custom sampling.

Qtip: Custom sampling allows you to select exactly the participants you want each time. There are no limits based on whether participants have already been surveyed.

Enabling Custom Sampling

Before you can manually add participants to a pulse survey, you need to configure your program schedule accordingly.

screenshot of a pulse program inside the schedule and content tab then on the program schedule page towards the bottom
screenshot of a pulse program inside the schedule and content tab then on the program schedule page towards the bottom

Under Sampling schedule, select Manually select participants from this program for every pulse (custom sampling).

Next, you need to make sure your surveys for the program are generated so you can add participants to them. To start generating Pulse surveys, complete your program setup.

Set up your survey template.
Add invite and reminder distribution templates.
Add participants to the program.
Qtip: The program participants act as the pool you can select survey participants from. Make sure every participant you want to eventually include is here.
Set up any optional features you’d like to include, like hierarchies or workflows.
Start your program.
Qtip: Automated sampling of program participants is incompatible with custom sampling for pulse surveys, since the goal is to add participants manually. If you visit the Sampling settings page, you will only see the following note.
the sampling settings page is blank except for a message that says you chose to manually select participants for each pulse survey. there is also a link to change this
the sampling settings page is blank except for a message that says you chose to manually select participants for each pulse survey. there is also a link to change this

Manually Adding Participants to a Pulse Survey

Attention: Make sure you are familiar with your pulse’s schedule. You will need to add participants to each survey before it launches. Surveys are created 30 days before distribution to give you lots of lead time.
Qtip: If you need a reminder to update your participants, you can make a workflow in your Pulse. Scheduled workflows can send out regular emails, Slack messages, or Microsoft Teams messages, depending on the channel where you want to receive your reminder.
Go to the Overview tab.
Overview tab of a pulse program
Overview tab of a pulse program
Select a survey from the left Projects list.
Select Participants.
participants tab of a survey and the option to manually add participants
participants tab of a survey and the option to manually add participants
Click Add participants.
Select Add participants from this program.
Select a method:
new window where you choose between 2 methods to add participants
new window where you choose between 2 methods to add participants
  • By people’s metadata: Add any participants that meet the metadata you’ve configured. You can add multiple metadata conditions. See more on Creating Metadata conditions.
  • By a person’s name or email: Search a participant by name or email and add them to the survey. You can only add 1 person at a time using this method.
Click Add.

Creating Metadata Conditions

In this section, we’ll cover hope to make metadata conditions and how those conditions are joined.

Select By people’s metadata.
configuring metadata
configuring metadata
Select a field.
Click Select value.
Select all the values you want to include. A participant can match any of these values to be included in the results.
new window opens where you can multi select values
new window opens where you can multi select values
Example: For department, you select engineering, marketing, and operations. That means the participants included in this pulse survey will belong to either the engineering, marketing, or operations departments.
Click Select.
To add more criteria, click the 3 dots and select Add condition below.
creating conditions
creating conditions
Qtip: You can add up to 8 total conditions.
Create your next condition. Your participants must match this condition and the previous one to be included in results.
2 conditions say metadata for department should be engineering, and metadata for country should be germany
2 conditions say metadata for department should be engineering, and metadata for country should be germany
Qtip: In other words, your participants must match all conditions to be included in the survey.
Click Add to finish adding participants to your pulse survey.
Example: Look at the condition below. Every participant included in this survey will be in the engineering department and the Germany office.
2 conditions say metadata for department should be engineering, and metadata for country should be germany
2 conditions say metadata for department should be engineering, and metadata for country should be germany
Example: Look at the condition below. Every participant will belong to the Mexico office; they must also belong to either the engineering, marketing, or operations departments. No one in the Mexico office belonging to human resources would be included, and no one in marketing from the Germany office would be included.
condition says metadata department should be marketing, engineering, or operations, and metadata country should be Mexico
condition says metadata department should be marketing, engineering, or operations, and metadata country should be Mexico

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