Pulse vs SurveyMonkey

When a question needs answers from a large, targeted sample, as when a marketing team sizes a market before a launch, SurveyMonkey can supply the respondents as well as the survey. Its Audience panel reaches 335M+ people in 130+ countries, drawing on a partnership with Cint announced in 2017, and custom screening questions sit on top of its targeting options.

Some survey work has to happen in person, away from a desk and a steady connection, such as a check-in with the staff on a warehouse floor or across a chain of stores. SurveyMonkey's Enterprise plan covers that case with offline mode in the SurveyMonkey Anywhere app. Where staff should not be named, the check-in can run with the Anonymous Responses option, and the people who ran it can follow the answers on a shareable dashboard that updates as responses arrive.

Hearing how a buyer picked between plans, or how a campaign landed with the people it reached, is work for Pulse. Where its interviews run on video, Pulse's video insights add what the customer does on screen, and the emotion that shows, which a transcript would miss. Every study's findings are then kept, searchable, in one repository that the next study's brief can draw on, so a team can read what earlier customers said before it writes its next question.

• SurveyMonkey on Capterra: 4.6 (10512 reviews)

1. Start from a theme in the open text. Draw the first Pulse study from a theme that SurveyMonkey's Thematic Analysis, a beta feature, found in a survey's open-text answers. Name that theme in the brief as the subject customers are asked to explain in their own words, and add the audience whose answers raised it along with the areas the conversation should reach.
2. Bring the survey's audience across. Customers the team already invites to its surveys by email can go straight into Pulse as an uploaded list. Where a survey went to SurveyMonkey Audience instead, turn its targeting into a profile in the brief, and give each segment the survey reported on a group of its own, with a profile and screener, inside one study.
3. Cover the countries the Audience survey reached. SurveyMonkey Audience responses the team bought in several countries mark out the markets the first Pulse study should cover. Recruit in each of them at once, to the profile in the brief, and hold the interviews in each market's language, from 240+ languages, enabled on request. Where results differed between countries, ask about that difference in the brief.
4. Give the survey's readers the interviews too. SurveyMonkey's Primary Admin, Full User and Analyst roles, with access set section by section, already say who on the team reads a survey's results. Give those same colleagues access to the Pulse study before it closes, so the people who read the survey figures also read what customers said in the interviews that the survey led to.

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