> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.gowindmill.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Pulse Surveys

> Ask your team custom questions on a recurring or one-time basis with Windmill pulse surveys delivered in Slack by Windy, with built-in reporting and trends.

Pulse surveys help you quickly gather targeted insights from your team. They’re lightweight, fast to create, and delivered directly in Slack by Windy. Anyone in your company — Members, Admins, or HR Admins — can create a Pulse, with visibility controls that determine who each person can send to.

## What Pulses are

A Pulse is a short survey that helps you understand how your team is doing right now.\
You can use Pulses to ask about anything, but we have a few presets in there to help jog your memory:

* Blockers
* AI usage
* Workplace needs
* All-hands feedback
* Off-site feedback
* Improvement opportunities

Windy generates a discussion guide for you based on your chosen topic, which you can edit before sending.

## Common use cases

* **Team health checks** — Gauge morale, motivation, or how the team is doing this week.
* **Post-launch or project feedback** — After a launch or cross-team project, send a short Pulse to the people involved to capture what went well, what could improve, and how collaborators worked together. Pick the specific participants and choose named or anonymous responses based on the kind of feedback you want.
* **Post-event feedback** — Collect reactions to all-hands, off-sites, or other meetings while they're still fresh.
* **Blockers and improvement opportunities** — Surface what's slowing the team down or where processes could be better.
* **Recurring check-ins** — Run the same Pulse on a weekly or monthly cadence to track trends over time.

## Can I ask numerical questions?

Yes — you can ask people to answer with a number, like a 1-5 rating.

To get the best results, be explicit in your Pulse prompt and discussion guide about the kind of answer you want. For example: "Please answer with a single number from 1 to 5. If someone replies with anything else, gently ask them for a number." Clear instructions like this help Windy steer the conversation back to a number when someone replies with words instead.

Keep in mind this isn't a hard rule — Windy doesn't strictly enforce numeric answers, and if someone really doesn't want to give a number, Windy will eventually accept what they say so the conversation doesn't stall.

We're working on better support for numerical Pulse questions.

## Who can send Pulses

Everyone in Windmill can create a Pulse:

* **Members**
* **Admins**
* **HR Admins**

Everyone can send Pulses to specific people, groups, or teams. Only Admins and HR Admins can send a Pulse to everyone in the company at once.

Delegated access is visibility-only. It can let someone see Pulse information in the same way they could if they were that person's manager, when response sharing allows manager visibility. It does not impersonate the manager or let the delegated user act for them, so it does not add permission to edit Pulses or change Pulse configuration.

## Creating a Pulse

<Steps>
  <Step title="Go to Pulses">
    Open the Pulses section in the Windmill sidebar.
  </Step>

  <Step title="New Pulse">
    Start a new Pulse survey.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Choose your Pulse Prompt">
    Describe why you're running the Pulse.

    Alternatively, you can choose from Ideas like All Hands feedback, Offsite feedback, Office needs, or Improvement opportunities.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Create your Discussion Guide">
    Windy generates a discussion guide. Add your own or remove discussion guide topics.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Select Participants">
    Select everyone, specific people, teams, or groups. You can also specify ICs or managers within a specified team or group.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Set Pulse Anonymity">
    Decide whether respondents will be named or anonymized.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Review Pulse">
    Set your Pulse name. The name appears in Slack and in your reporting.
  </Step>
</Steps>

After clicking **Create Pulse**, the Pulse is created — but not yet sent.

## Sending or scheduling a Pulse

Once your Pulse is ready, choose how you want Windy to deliver it.

Click **Test Pulse** to test your pulse first, and click **Launch Pulse** to set your send schedule.

### Test Pulse

Send the Pulse **only to yourself** in Slack.\
This lets you preview the full flow before delivering it to others.

<Note>
  Tests do not notify or involve the audience you selected.
</Note>

### Send now

Windy immediately sends the survey to your selected audience in Slack.

### Schedule for later

Schedule the Pulse to send:

* On a one-time date and time
* On a recurring basis (weekly, monthly, etc.)
* Based on a specific calendar event
* On a schedule based on employee hire date anniversaries

Scheduling is ideal for team health checks or ongoing feedback cycles.

## Reviewing Pulse responses

There are four ways to review Pulse responses: in the Windmill Dashboard with filtering, by exporting a CSV, by asking Windy, or through the [MCP server](/features/mcp) from an AI assistant.

For **named Pulses**, all four methods support filtering by **group**, **department**, **start date**, or **job title**. For **anonymous Pulses**, individual responses aren't attributed to a respondent, so they can't be filtered or exported by employee metadata.

<Note>
  If you need per-department breakdowns of an anonymous Pulse, use the **Duplicate** button on the Pulse to create one anonymous Pulse per department, each scoped to a different audience.
</Note>

<Note>
  "Department" works as a filter because departments are typically modeled as groups (synced from your HRIS, Google Workspace, or Slack). If your departments aren't set up as groups, Windy won't be able to slice the data that way. Learn more in [Groups](/org-chart/groups).
</Note>

### In the platform (with filtering)

After a Pulse is sent, responses come back in real time on the **Pulse results page in the Windmill Dashboard**. For named Pulses, you can filter responses on that page by group, department, start date, or job title.

Pulse context also feeds into 1:1 prep, recaps, performance review packets, and team insights — so insights resurface where you need them, not just in the report.

While a Pulse is still open, owners can summarize the full owner view. If **Response Sharing** is set to **Visible to Managers**, managers can view and summarize the responses in their own scope before the Pulse closes. They do not get access to responses outside their scope.

You can also enable [live response streaming](/features/pulse-surveys/notifications) to post each response into a Slack channel as it comes in.

### CSV export

Export Pulse responses to CSV from the Pulse results page. The export reflects whatever filter is active on the page, so you can scope it to a specific group, department, start date, or job title for named Pulses.

Anonymous Pulses can be exported too, but the CSV won't include employee metadata, so it can't be sliced by department or other attributes. Use the Duplicate-per-department workaround above if you need anonymous breakdowns.

### Windy

Ask Windy in Slack or in the Windmill Dashboard to filter or summarize Pulse responses. Windy can analyze named Pulses by any filter dimension:

* "Summarize responses to the Q1 engagement pulse, broken down by group"
* "Show me what the Engineering group said in the latest blockers pulse"
* "Compare how the Sales and Engineering groups responded to the workload pulse"

### MCP

If you've connected the [Windmill MCP server](/features/mcp) to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or another MCP-aware AI tool, you can ask the assistant to read Pulse responses (and the post-pulse report) and synthesize recommendations.

Example prompt:

> *"Using the results of our latest onsite Pulse, what are the top 3 things we should improve and what are 2–3 concrete ideas we could implement?"*

A few important details:

* MCP only exposes data you can already see in the Windmill Dashboard. If you can't see the Pulse in Windmill, your AI tool can't access it via MCP either.
* Data returned by Windmill **does pass through your AI tool's model** to generate the answer. The MCP server itself does not send data to any AI model — but the AI tool you connect does process whatever data it receives.

See [MCP](/features/mcp) for setup steps and the full capability list.

## Response Anonymity

**Response Anonymity** controls whether responses are attributed to the respondent. You set this when creating a Pulse, and can edit it later from the Pulse's settings.

| Setting       | Behavior                                                                                                                          |
| ------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Named**     | The author's name is shown with each response. Responses can be filtered, segmented, and exported by employee metadata.           |
| **Anonymous** | Responses are not attributed to a respondent. Windy tells participants before they begin whether the Pulse is named or anonymous. |

<Note>
  Live response streaming in Slack is only available for **named** Pulses. Anonymous Pulses cannot stream responses because respondent identity is protected.
</Note>

## Response Sharing

**Response Sharing** controls *who* can see Pulse results. It's independent of [Response Anonymity](#response-anonymity) — for example, you can have an anonymous Pulse that is still visible to all participants, or a named Pulse that is private to owners. Open **Edit Response Sharing** on a Pulse to pick one of three modes:

| Response Sharing mode           | Who sees responses                                  | Best for                                                             |
| ------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Private to Owners**           | Only Pulse owners                                   | Company-wide pulses where HR wants to keep responses private         |
| **Visible to Managers**         | Each manager sees only their own reports' responses | Company-wide pulses where managers should see their team's responses |
| **Visible to All Participants** | Every participant sees all responses                | Team retros, standups, and similar shared check-ins                  |

## Piloting a Pulse

**Yes — Pulses support pilot rollouts.** You can configure a Pulse so that only your pilot users receive it and are notified, while the broader organization is not involved at all.

To run a Pulse with a pilot group only:

1. In the **Select Participants** step, choose the specific pilot users (or a pilot group).
2. Click **Test Pulse** to send the survey only to yourself and preview the admin and respondent experience end-to-end.
3. When you're ready, click **Launch Pulse** — only the pilot users you selected receive it in Slack. No notifications go to the broader org.

## FAQs

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="I sent a Pulse as named by mistake — can I change it to anonymous after launch?">
    No. Pulse anonymity is set before launch and can't be changed once the Pulse has been sent. If you intended to run an anonymous Pulse:

    1. Close or cancel the existing Pulse so responses stop coming in.
    2. Create a new Pulse with the same questions and audience, and set anonymity to **Anonymized** in the **Set Pulse Anonymity** step.
    3. Let your audience know to ignore the first Pulse and respond to the new one instead.

    If the original Pulse already collected sensitive responses, contact [support@gowindmill.com](mailto:support@gowindmill.com) before relaunching.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I analyze anonymous Pulse responses by group?">
    No. Respondent identity is stripped from anonymous responses, so they can't be sliced by team, department, or any other group. Use a named Pulse if you need to break results down by group.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What's the difference between named and anonymous Pulses?">
    In a named Pulse, responses are attributed to the individual respondent and can be analyzed by group. In an anonymous Pulse, individual responses are not attributed to respondents and can't be sliced by group. Pick anonymous for sensitive topics where honest feedback matters more than attribution.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Explore Pulses

* [Schedule Types](/features/pulse-surveys/scheduling-types) — Set a send schedule for your Pulse surveys
* [Reminders and Nudges](/features/pulse-surveys/reminders) — Set a reminder schedule for your Pulse surveys
* [Notifications](/features/pulse-surveys/notifications) — Set notifications for Pulse survey response updates