Launching and Closing a Survey

Applies to:Owner, Admin

A survey sits harmlessly as a draft until you launch it. Launching sends invitation emails to everyone in your audience, and it cannot be undone — so the buttons that do it are deliberately at the top of the editor where you’ll see them, and both ask for confirmation first.

Launch now, or schedule

Both options appear in the survey editor while the survey is a draft, and both stay disabled until you’ve added at least one question.

• Launch now — sends invitations immediately. You’ll be asked to confirm, because “Invitation emails will be sent to all recipients. This cannot be undone.”
• Schedule — pick a date and time for the invitations to go out on their own. The survey still closes at the time set in Settings, so scheduling changes when it opens, not when it ends.

A scheduled survey can be pulled back with Unschedule, which returns it to draft. Once it’s actually gone live, there’s no unsending it.

Note

Recipients without an email address on file are skipped. They’ll still be counted in your audience, but they won’t receive an invitation — so an unusually low response rate is sometimes a contact-data problem rather than an engagement problem. Check your directory if the numbers look wrong.

How residents receive it

Launching a survey reaches people three ways at once:

• An email with the subject “We’d like your input:” followed by your survey title
• An in-app notification
• A Surveys waiting for your input card on their Home page, which stays until they respond or the survey closes

Every recipient gets their own private link, and each link can be used once. Residents don’t need to be logged in to respond.

Chasing non-responders

Two kinds of reminder exist, and both only ever go to people who haven’t responded.

The automatic reminder fires once, a set number of hours before the survey closes — 24 by default, adjustable in Settings. You don’t have to do anything to trigger it.

Manual reminders are sent with the Send reminder button, available on both the editor and the results page while a survey is live. You’ll be asked to confirm, then everyone outstanding gets an email.

Manual reminders are rate-limited to one per 24 hours. If you try again too soon the button won’t send, and you’ll be told how many hours remain. This is a guardrail worth appreciating rather than working around — a survey that emails people daily gets ignored, and the people who ignore it are the ones you most wanted to hear from.

Closing and archiving

A survey closes itself at the Closes at time you set. You can also close it early with Close survey while it’s live — useful once you’ve hit a quorum and further waiting adds nothing.

Closing stops new responses. It doesn’t hide anything: results stay fully available, and a public results page stays published if you’ve enabled one.

Once closed, Archive tidies the survey out of your way. Archiving is a filing action, not a deletion — the results remain readable.

Caution

Two things are worth knowing before you launch.

Closing is a one-way step — a survey you close early stays closed.

More importantly, a survey can no longer be edited once somebody has responded. This is deliberate: the answers you’ve collected were given against a particular set of questions, a particular deadline, and a particular privacy promise, and changing any of those after the fact would misrepresent what people actually agreed to answer. While a survey is live and still unanswered you can reach the editor via Edit survey on the results page and adjust the closing time there. Once the first response lands, that settles.

So it’s worth setting Closes at with some room in it from the start.

Where to go next

• Reading what came back? See Viewing Survey Results.
• Publishing the outcome? See Sharing Results Publicly.