In smartcrowds, Pulse surveys are created by scheduling Pulse Questions within one or more Crowds. smartcrowds users who are members of Crowds that have live Pulse Questions are then able to access and take those surveys on their own device (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone).

Special Kiosk users can also be created and associated with a Crowd, enabling the same surveys that are scheduled to users to also be available on Kiosk devices (see the section Creating and Linking a Kiosk User to a Crowd later in this article for more information on this).

There are two ways to schedule a Pulse Question:

Method 1 is most useful when you want to schedule a single question into more than 1 Crowd. Method 2 is the preferred method if you are looking to build a multi-question survey for a specific Crowd. We'll take you through both methods below:

To schedule a question from the 'Pulse Questions' page, Go to Admin > Pulse Questions from the main menu.

Scroll down to find the question that you are looking for. (If you can't find a suitable question, choose the green Add Pulse Question button at the top of the page to create a brand new question.)

Once you've found the appropriate question, choose the Edit Schedule button for an existing Question, as per below:

The 'Schedule Question' page will open.

Click the green Schedule Question [1 below] button to create a new schedule entry, or if there is an existing schedule that you want to edit, click on the white panel to open it's settings.

Choose the Crowd that you want to schedule the question into:

Now jump to the section further down this help article "Setting up a Schedule" to find out how to set the options that are right for your survey.

(Note that once you have added (or edited) your schedule entry, you can schedule this question into more Crowds by tapping the green Schedule Question button at the bottom of the screen. There's no limit to how many Crowds you can schedule your question into at the same time!)

To schedule Pulse questions from a Crowd Profile page, first find the Crowd you want to schedule questions into and open it's profile page.

Choose Pulse Schedules from the ellipses on the Crowd profile page:

The 'Schedule Question' page will open.

Click the green Schedule Question button to create a new schedule entry, or if there is an existing schedule that you want to edit, click on the white panel to open it's settings.

Click on the 'Choose a Question' field, and select the Question that you want to schedule into this Crowd from the list of available Questions.

Note that you can filter the list of Questions by typing in the 'Free text search' field, or by choosing one or more of the Question Types (3 or 5 emojis, 2 or 2 reactions, etc):

Now jump to the section directly below ("Setting up a Schedule") to find out how to set the other Schedule options that are right for your survey.

(Note that once you have added (or edited) your schedule entry, you can schedule more Questions into this Crowd by tapping the green Schedule Question button at the bottom of the screen. There's no limit to how many Questions you can schedule into your Crowd at the same time!)

The following additional Schedule Questions options appears from both paths;

The start date and time for the scheduled Pulse Question in the Crowd.   Once set, the Pulse Question will be available to survey respondents as soon as the Start Date/Time has been reached.

NOTE - If you are scheduling multiple Questions, the order that they appear will be controlled by Start Date/Time that has been set, down to the second. This means, for example, that you if schedule Question 2 in a 2 Question survey to start 1 second after Question 1, when a person takes the survey, Question 1 will appear before Question 2.  

The end date and time for the scheduled Pulse Question in the Crowd. Once set, the Pulse Question will no longer be available to survey respondents as soon as the End Date/Time has been reached.  

2 further display settings are available as follows:

1 - Users Can Answer More Than Once?

When scheduling a Question, it can be set to allow many responses from users, or one response from users. When scheduled to allow many responses, each user will be able to respond to a Question once per day for the duration that the Pulse question has been published. When scheduled to allow only one response, each user will only have one opportunity to answer the question.

To schedule a Question for a many responses (i.e. one per day), toggle the Users Can Answer More Than Once? option to ON. To schedule a Question for single responses, toggle the option OFF.

2 - Show Pulse Option Text

Questions can be displayed in a Pulse survey with or without the option text below the image.

To display the Question with the text, toggle the option to ON.

The Question will appear to survey respondents as follows:

To display the Question without the option text below, toggle the option to OFF.

The Question will appear to survey respondents as follows:

An Alert workflow can be defined which will create an alert in a separate Crowd/Group.
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A notification can be setup which will automatically be sent by email to all Crowd members when the schedule begins.

When you've saved a Question Schedule, it will either be 'Live' or 'Not Live' depending on the start and end dates that were set.

You can easily see which questions are live with the 'Live' icon next to them.

If you thought you had set a question to Live (via it's start and end dates) but it's not appearing as Live, you may have set the dates incorrectly, so just click on the white panel for the question to fix the dates as required.

When you have scheduled more than 1 Question into a Crowd at the same time, the order that they will be displayed for Survey respondents is based on the start date/time given to them.

In the example below, both Questions start on the same date, but the Question "What should we stock in our vending machine?" starts one second after the Question "Which planet would you visit?", and therefore appears second on this list, and on the survey which will appear to survey respondents.

To change the order of Questions in a Crowd, click the white panels to edit the start date / time to meet your needs.

Pulse Survey questions can be sent to Kiosks as well as users of the system. In both cases, the Pulse Surveys are actually scheduled to a Crowd, and in the cases of Kiosks, special Kiosk users can be created which are associated with a Crowd.

Kiosk Users are created in the main smartcrowds applicationcan using the Admin-> Users menu option.  Choose the Add Kiosk User button

The Add/Update Kiosk User page appears

Complete the required fields, including the name of the Crowd that this Kiosk User will be linked to.   

Note that the Image that can be uploaded is the default image that will be displayed on Kiosk Devices for that Kiosk User when there are no currently ‘Live’ scheduled questions. 

When the required information has been completed, the Save button creates the new user in the system.  Choosing Cancel aborts the process without creating the user.