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How to launch a pulse survey

Create a recurring pulse survey, add questions, publish it, and run your first campaign to collect team engagement data.

Open in SPLX OS

Pulse surveys are short, recurring surveys that measure team engagement on a regular cadence — weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. SPLX OS stores the survey definition separately from the campaigns that send it, so you build once and run repeatedly.

Before you start

You need admin role to create and manage surveys. The People module must be enabled. Non-admins cannot access the Surveys page at all; once a campaign is active, they receive invitations to respond through their profile.

Step 1: Open the Surveys page

Go to People → Surveys at /people/surveys. If this is your first survey, you'll see an empty state.

Click New survey in the top-right corner.

Step 2: Configure the survey

The New survey dialog has four fields:

Field Notes
Name Required. Something like "Spring 2026 Pulse" or "Monthly Engagement Check"
Kind Choose Pulse for a recurring engagement survey. Themed is for one-off surveys
Purpose Choose the intent: Engagement, Manager feedback, eNPS, Onboarding, Exit, or Custom
Cadence For Pulse kind: Weekly, Bi-weekly, or Monthly

You can optionally Seed from library — this pre-populates the survey with standard questions from the built-in question library for your chosen purpose. Browse the full library anytime by clicking View library on the Surveys page.

Click Create survey. The survey is created in draft status and you land on its detail page.

Step 3: Add or edit questions

On the survey detail page, click + Add question. Choose a question type:

Type Use when
Scale 1–5 Standard engagement rating
NPS scale (0–10) Net Promoter Score style
Single choice One answer from a list
Multiple choice Multiple answers from a list
Free text Open-ended response

Enter the question text. Drag questions to reorder them using the grip handles on the left side of each row. Delete a question with the trash icon.

If you seeded from the library, review the pre-populated questions and remove or adjust any that don't fit your team.

Step 4: Publish the survey

Once your questions are ready, click Publish in the survey header. The status changes from Draft to Published. Published surveys can run campaigns; draft surveys cannot.

Publishing is not reversible through the UI. Archived surveys cannot be run again — create a new survey instead if you need to restart from scratch.

Step 5: Run a campaign

A campaign is a single send of the survey to a group of people with an open and close date. On the published survey's detail page, click + New campaign.

Fill in:

Field Notes
Name Label for this specific run, e.g. "April 2026 Pulse"
Opens at Date and time the survey becomes available to respondents
Closes at Date and time responses stop being accepted

Click Create campaign. The campaign starts in Scheduled status and transitions to Active when it opens.

Priya at Northwoods Outfitters runs a bi-weekly pulse on engagement and manager feedback. Each Monday she creates a campaign that opens the same day and closes Friday. The active campaign shows a response progress bar on the Surveys page — 17/23 responses is a good sign by Wednesday.

Step 6: Monitor responses

Active campaigns appear in the Active campaigns section at the top of the Surveys page with a live progress bar showing completed / invited counts. Click a campaign row to open its detail page, which shows per-question response distributions.

What to do next

Pair pulse survey results with structured check-ins for the team members where scores flag a concern — see How to run a 1-on-1 check-in.

To automate trigger-based sends (for example, sending an onboarding survey when someone joins), click Process triggers on the Surveys page. This runs the automation engine that checks for scheduled pulse cycles and onboarding events and creates campaigns automatically.