Building a Custom Pulse

Availability: Pro plan (and trial orgs during trial).

On Pro you can clone any pulse (a core pulse, a library pulse, or one of your own) and edit the clone, build a pulse from scratch with your own questions and branching logic, or describe what you want to measure and start from a draft. The core pulses stay untouched (they're the baseline every plan ships with) and your custom pulses sit alongside them on the My pulses tab of the Pulses page.

This article walks through the four common flows.

The golden rule: clone before you edit

If you want a pulse that's "like the core one but with one extra question", always clone. Don't try to modify the core pulse. The app won't let you anyway, and even if it did, you'd lose the baseline every GAiGE org relies on.

Cloning is a one-click action: on the Pulses page, hit Clone to edit on the pulse you want to start from, on its row in My pulses or on its card in the Library. You'll be taken straight to the Pulse Builder with an editable copy, ready to tweak.

Flow 1: clone a core pulse and tweak

Best for: "I want The AI Pulse plus one extra question about error rates" or "I want to soften the language in The AI Review."

Pulses page → My pulses → Clone (on whichever pulse you want to start from)
You're in the Builder on the clone. The breadcrumb at the top says "Cloned from The AI Pulse" so you know what you're working from.
Change the name (it defaults to "The AI Pulse (copy)") to something specific, like "The AI Pulse (Engineering cut)".
Add, remove, or reword questions. The cadence, subject type and tool assignment came along with the clone. Change any of them if you need to.
Save draft to keep working on it, or Save and activate to start firing immediately.

Once saved, the pulse sits under Your custom pulses on the Pulses page, tagged "Cloned from The AI Pulse" so you can always trace the lineage.

Flow 2: build from scratch

Best for: something none of the core pulses cover, like a short run of feedback on a specific tool's onboarding.

Pulses page → Library tab → Create a custom pulse
The Builder opens empty. Start typing your first question at the top.
Answer What is this pulse about? This is the choice to get right, and it's fixed once the pulse is created:
- One tool: the pulse goes to the people assigned that tool, and its answers feed that tool's numbers. Pick the tool below the question.
- The whole organisation: everyone gets it, whether or not they have an AI tool assigned, and nothing it collects is attributed to a tool.
For each question, pick the answer type: single choice, multi-select, rating (1-5), free text, slider, number, NPS (0-10), yes/no (the primary branching type), or matrix.
For each question, set a report category. This is what decides whether an answer becomes a chart or just sits in the raw responses:
- Scale: a 0-100 gauge. Needs a short metric name, and on a single-choice question the options must run best first, because they're scored by position.
- Satisfaction, NPS, adoption, time impact: the headline tool metrics. Time impact needs a minutes value on every option or it reports nothing.
- Usage breakdown: a distribution chart of who picked what.
- Qualitative: free text, shown as written and grouped into themes.
- Exclude: recorded, kept off the dashboards. Right for context and routing questions.
Pick a cadence: how often this pulse fires per user.
Save.

Flow 3: describe it, then edit the draft

Best for: you know what you want to find out, and you'd rather not spend twenty minutes deciding whether question four is a slider or a rating.

Pulses page → Library tab → Describe the pulse you want 2, say what you want to measure, the way you'd say it to a colleague. A sentence or two is plenty: "whether the new notetaker is saving people time in meetings".
Choose what the pulse is about: One tool, The whole organisation, or Not sure, suggest one.
Draft the pulse. A few seconds later the Builder opens with the draft in it: a name, a description, the questions with their answer types, branching where it earns its place, and a report category on every question.
Change whatever you like, then save it. It's yours from that point on.

Nothing is saved and nothing is sent until you say so. The draft arrives unsaved and switched off, in the same editor you'd have used anyway, and it goes out to your team only when you activate it. It is a starting point, not a decision.

Why this is worth using even if you enjoy writing surveys. The fiddly part of a pulse isn't the questions, it's the mapping underneath them. A scale question whose options run the wrong way round reports the exact opposite of the truth. A time-saved question with no minutes on its options reports nothing at all. Getting those right is invisible expertise, and it's what the draft brings.

If it can't draft what you asked for, you'll see "We couldn't turn that into a pulse. Try describing what you want to measure in a sentence or two." That usually means the description was doing several jobs at once. Split it, or name the one thing you want to know.

If you don't see the card, drafting isn't available on your account right now. Everything else on this page still works: Create a custom pulse builds the same thing by hand.

Flow 4: add branching logic

Best for: "only show question 3 if the answer to question 1 was 'yes'". Classic skip-logic survey design.

Every question in the Builder has a Flow (after this question) section at the bottom. That's where branching lives.

On a yes/no question:

If answer is Yes → [pick the next question]
If answer is No → [pick the next question]
Leave either blank to end the survey on that path

On a single-choice question:

Each option gets its own "if this option → next question" row
Plus a Default next at the bottom for answers with no explicit route

On any other question type:

Just a single Next question → picker

The extension honours this branching natively, so the end user only ever sees the questions they're routed through, so a pulse can feel short to them (2 questions) while carrying the capacity for many (6 questions with 4 of them conditional).

What core pulses can and can't do

When you open a core or library pulse in the Builder, the questions show as a read-only list with a note where the editor would be:

"Core pulse questions are fixed so results stay comparable across teams. Clone this pulse to build your own version."

Allowed: activate/pause, cadence, description, delivery window, header colour. On a one-off, the cadence controls are replaced by the closing date, the completion target and whether people may leave required questions blank. Not allowed: change questions, the name, or the tool assignment. Reports and plan rules recognise these pulses by name, so included and library pulses keep theirs. Nor can a pulse change what it's about after it's created: one tool stays one tool, the whole organisation stays the whole organisation, and a one-off stays a one-off. Cloning gives you a copy to set up differently.

The Clone to customise → button beside that note produces an editable custom copy in one click. That's the supported path for any change beyond the schedule.

Editing a custom pulse that already has responses

The Builder shows an amber warning when you open a custom pulse with existing responses:

"Heads up. This pulse has N responses already. Adding, removing, or changing the meaning of questions can make it harder to compare new data with what you've already collected. Consider cloning instead…"

This is a soft guardrail, not a block. If you're making a minor wording tweak, proceed. If you're fundamentally changing what a question measures, clone the pulse, edit the clone, and pause the original. That way historical reports stay internally consistent, and new reports start fresh on the new version.

Pulse lifecycle

Draft. A new pulse, not yet firing. Toggle the Active pill on the Pulses page to flip it live.
Active. Firing per cadence. On a one-off, Open: everyone is being asked, once each.
Paused. Temporarily not firing. Existing responses still show in reports.
Closed. A one-off that has finished, because it reached its date, reached its target, or you closed it. Closed is a kind of paused, so everything below behaves the same. Reopen starts the asking again.
Archived. Finished its run. A paused pulse with responses moves to the Archive tab: it stops delivering, and its responses stay readable in Reports. Unarchive it any time; it comes back paused.
Deleted. Gone for good, along with every response it collected. Only a paused pulse with no responses can be deleted directly; anything with data is deleted from the Archive, after typing the pulse's name to confirm. (The three standard pulses can be paused or archived but never deleted, and every org keeps the baseline three.)

Response rates on custom pulses

Everything that makes the core pulses work on custom pulses too:

Keep it short. 1-3 questions beats 10 every time. Response rates degrade fast above 5 questions.
Little and often beats one big retrospective. Short pulses on a frequent cadence keep the recall window small. Asking "did this tool save you time this week?" gets a far more reliable answer than asking once a quarter.
Respect skip. The dismiss button is first-class. People who can skip freely are more likely to answer when they choose to.

If your custom pulse response rate drops below 60%, see Why is my response rate low?. It is almost always either too long or too frequent, rarely something more fundamental.

Deleting a custom pulse

Pause the pulse first: an active pulse can't be removed. If it has never collected a response, Delete removes it outright. If it has responses, Archive it instead; from the Archive you can delete it for good, which removes the pulse and every answer it collected (you'll type the pulse's name to confirm, and reports for past periods will change). If you just want it out of the way with its history intact, leave it in the Archive. That's what it's for. See the pulse library for the full lifecycle.

What's not yet in custom pulses

Transparent about the gaps:

Community templates. Ready-made pulses live in the pulse library, but there's no marketplace of pulses other customers have built for your industry yet.
A/B testing a custom pulse. You can't split your team 50/50 onto two versions to compare wording. You'd need to create two pulses and assign them to different groups manually.

Neither of these is hard to add; neither is a top request yet. Tell us if they would be.

Related: The pulse library · Taking your AI baseline · The three core pulses explained · Reading your dashboard · Why is my response rate low?