Selecting the right frequency for your survey is an important decision. On the one hand, you want to collect data regularly to see how the responses to each question evolve. On the other hand, sending out surveys too often will cause survey fatigue and low participation.
To reduce the burden on survey participants, we recommend a lower frequency for long surveys with many questions. However, you can also use 'Question Rotation,' which allows you to include only a sub-sample of your questions or topics (categories) in each instant. Questions or topics are selected by their order in the 'Questions' section of the survey settings.
For example, if you have an engagement survey with 40 questions in total, you would likely want to enable question rotation. You will first add all 40 questions to the 'Questions' section of the survey. Then, in the 'Timing' section, you would determine how many questions (or topics) are covered in each round. If you choose '5,' this means each time the survey is released, the following five questions from the list of 40 are sent. By doing this, you can limit survey fatigue, promote unique answers, and get the data you need.
If you want to ask specific questions every round, regardless of the rotation, you can pin them by clicking the pin symbol next to the question in the 'Questions' section. For example, companies may want to pin the two engagement questions to consistently measure how other questions / topics influence employee engagement.
When setting up a regular pulse survey, you can choose to send out the survey:
- weekly
- every two weeks
- monthly
- every 2 months
- every 3 months
- every 4 months
- every 6 months
- or every year.
Alternatively, you can choose to send out a survey only once, at a date specified by you. You can also set the day of the week when the survey should be sent. Finally, you can select the survey start date.
Changing survey frequency after kick-off is easy. Go to the survey, click 'Survey Settings' > 'Timing,' adjust the frequency, and save your changes.