Once you have created and launched a new Pulse survey, you'll normally want to let people know as soon as it's available for them to complete.

For Questions that are not yet live, smartcrowds offers a Notifications function to make this a simple process. To set up a notification, schedule a question with a start date/time that is in the future (i.e. the start date/time is greater than now).

The Schedule a Notification toggle will become available which, when toggled on, displays the Notifications email template below.

NOTE - the toggle is not available when the schedule start date/time is in the past.

Enter a suitable email subject and email body text, and choose the Save button to save your notification.

Note that the system will provide some default email body text that you can use if you want, but feel free to change it to something that better meets your needs.

A 'Go to the Survey' link is automatically added to the message, and you can change the wording of this if you want by clicking on the link and choosing the Edit option.

You'll notice that notifications are created for Questions, and not for Surveys. This gives you more granular control over what message you send for each Question, and the timing of the notifications that are sent, but if you are building a multi-question survey you'll often just want to send a single notification to the overall survey.

To do this, set up your survey as normal (by scheduling the Questions using the start date/time order that you want them to appear), and create a notification for the first Question in the survey only.

In your email notification text, rather than referring to the single question only in your message, you might want to refer to all of the questions in that survey.

The 'Go to the Survey' link always take user to the full survey, so you don't need to change this.

For questions that are already live, smartcrowds also offers the ability to send an instant announcement. This can be a great way of sending reminders about surveys that have been running for some time.

To send an instant announcement, choose the 'Announcement' icon from the header bar of a Question, illustrated below.

A screen similar to the example below will be displayed.

Enter the subject and body text for your announcement email, and choose Send Now - it's as simple as that! An email will now be sent to everyone in the Crowd, reminding them that the survey is available to take.

Just like the 'Helpful Tips' covered above, if you are sending a reminder about a multi-question survey, you might prefer to send a single announcement only, rather than an announcement for every question. To do this, just choose one of the questions, and change your message to refer to the whole survey.

The 'Go to the Survey' link in the email body will always take users to the full survey, so you won't need to change this.