Recurring surveys

Scheduling a recurrence allows you to regularly send a survey to the same group on a schedule: daily, weekly, quarterly, or even the first Monday of every month. You can configure this once so your automated surveys will go out on schedule.

Use recurring surveys for employee pulse surveys, daily screenings, etc.

Typically, an email invitation allows one response per contact. With the recurring schedule enabled, once the specified increment has passed, respondents can access the original link in their invitation and will begin a new response. If the channel, 'Email' of 'SMS' is active, then a new invitation will be sent too. The links in all invitations for a specific contact remain the same.

Available distribution channels for recurring surveys are via email, paper, or SMS.

Note: The email option is only available if you are sending surveys using the Agile Research email system.

Previous responses not deleted

When the schedule calls for contacts to be reset, then the links between the contacts and their previous answers are broken. The previous answers of the contacts remain in the survey and are available in the reporting and downloads.

This means that you won't be able to filter directly on contact metadata. For example, say you have placed the employee department in custom field 1, you will need to create a hidden dropdown question to hold that information and pre-fill it with the custom field 1. That way, you will be able to filter on 'department' in the reports.

See Capturing contact data in hidden questions for additional information.

Status after reset

When the recurring schedule resets the contacts in the survey, you can choose which status the contacts go back to:

  • Included — The contact will be sent a new invitation.
  • Invited — The contact will not be sent a new invitation.

In both cases, the contact can then take the survey again. The contact's unique survey URL always remains the same.

When contacts click on the link in their invitation, they will see one of three pages depending on their status:

  • Included, invited, reminded — The first page of the survey.
  • Partially responded — The page where they stopped.
  • Responded completely — The appropriate thank-you page.

Contacts that can be reset

Not all contacts will be reset. Only contacts with the following statuses are reset:

  • Invited
  • Reminded
  • Partially responded
  • Responded completely

Contacts that are paused, opted out, bounced, screened out, etc. will not be reset. They can be reset manually on the Contacts page.

Setting a recurrence schedule

To set up a recurrence schedule, complete the following steps:

  1. Open your survey.
  2. Select Distribute.

  3. Select Email, Paper, or SMS.
  4. Select Recurring schedule.

    Recurring schedule.

  5. Configure and activate the schedule.

    Recurring schedule details.

  6. Click Save.