Network surveys: authoring, sending, and starter packs

What this is

Network surveys are the multi-question pulses your HQ team writes and sends out to the network. They're one of two message types under Broadcast (the other is one-way broadcasts, which don't collect a response). A broadcast is a message; a survey is a question set. Operators answer from their own IQ, and HQ reads back only the aggregated distribution per question, never who answered what.

There are two distinct patterns living side by side in the same Surveys screen:

• Network Survey (hq_to_members): HQ writes the questions and sends them straight to every active operator in the group. This is what the rest of this article walks through in detail.
• Team Template (hq_template_for_teams): HQ writes a survey as a template for franchisees to run with their own teams. HQ never sees individual responses on these; only how many distinct operators have adopted the template rolls up to HQ.

Single-question pulses with a short auto-close window are a related but separate surface called Polls, covered on its own tab. If you just need a fast yes/no or 1 to 5 read on something this week, use a Poll instead of a Survey.

Where to find it

• Read-only summary: the Reports & Communication page (sidebar Reports, hq.verinode.ai/reports) shows a Surveys row with your recent surveys as tiles, and a Surveys tab in its detail view. See /help/hq-reports-overview for that rolled-up view. Tapping a tile there just shows you what's already there; it isn't where you author or send.
• Authoring and sending: the working surface is Broadcast in the sidebar (hq.verinode.ai/broadcast), on its Surveys tab. The same screen also has a clean, bookmarkable URL at hq.verinode.ai/surveys. If your network is set up as an association, you'll also see a Member Surveys shortcut lower in the sidebar under the Membership group; it opens the identical Surveys screen.

Both paths land you on the same page: a hero panel with your survey stats, followed by a row of survey tiles, and a + New survey button in the header for admins.

The Surveys screen

The hero panel sits under the eyebrow "Network surveys." The headline number is surveys sent in the last 30 days. Next to it, a pill reads however many are currently active ("N active"), or if none are active but you've sent some, "N sent 30d," or "Nothing sent recently" if the network hasn't had a survey yet.

Below the headline:

• With no surveys authored yet: "Send a multi-question pulse to every active operator. Operators answer from their IQ surveys section; HQ sees only the aggregated distribution per question, never per-member responses."
• Once you've authored at least one: "N total surveys authored," plus, if you've sent one, "last sent [relative time]" (today, N days ago, or N months ago).

Three supporting numbers sit under that: Responses 30d (aggregated across every survey sent in that window), Active surveys (sent and not yet closed), and All-time surveys (every survey ever authored, sent or not, with the last-sent date underneath).

Below the hero, the Surveys row lists your most recent surveys as tiles, newest first (up to 12 at a time). Each tile shows:

• A status label, Draft, Active, or Closed, with "· template" appended if it's a Team Template rather than a Network Survey.
• The survey title as the headline.
• For a draft: how many questions it has. For a sent Network Survey: the response count and question count together (for example, "14 responses · 3 questions"). For a sent Team Template: how many operators have adopted it and the question count.
• A line showing "Not yet sent," "Sent [relative time]," or "Closed [relative time]."

With nothing authored yet, the row reads: "No surveys authored yet. Use the New survey button to draft a multi-question pulse, then send it to the network."

Clicking any tile opens the survey's detail view (below). Clicking + New survey, visible to admins only, opens the author modal.

Authoring a survey

The New survey modal is a single form with three parts: starter packs, the title and closing date, and the question list.

Verinode starter packs

If Verinode's catalog has at least one published starter pack, a collapsible Verinode starter packs section sits at the top of the modal, open by default until you pick one. It reads: "Pick a starter pack to pre-fill the question list. You can edit every question before sending."

Each pack in the grid shows its category (for example, team engagement, vendor satisfaction, tool stack, process review, safety, reputation, recruiting, or compliance), whether it was written as a survey or a poll, the pack's name, and how many questions it has. Clicking a pack fills in the title and question list immediately; you can then edit, add, or remove any question before saving. Once applied, the section header shows "loaded [pack name]" so you can see which one you're working from.

Packs written for the single-question Polls surface show up here too, alongside multi-question survey packs; either kind can seed your question list. Whichever pack you start from, what you save here is always a Network Survey. The Polls tab has its own separate compose flow if you want to send a genuine one-question poll instead.

If the catalog hasn't loaded any packs yet, this section doesn't render at all; the form just opens straight to Title.

Title and closing date

Title is required (for example, "Q2 operations pulse"). Closes (optional) takes a date. The helper text under it explains what happens: "After this date the survey shows as Closed in the network's IQ feed; new responses are rejected." If you set a close date, it has to be in the future; the form rejects a date that's today or earlier.

Leaving it blank means the survey stays active indefinitely once sent, until an admin closes it manually.

Questions

Below that is the question list, labeled "Questions (N)," with a + Add question button. You can have up to 8 questions per survey; the Add button disables once you hit that cap.

Every question row has:

• A question label, the text operators see. Required; capped at 200 characters.
• A type selector with three choices:

- Rating (1-5): a five-point scale. - Yes / No: a binary choice. - Free text: an open response.

• A Required checkbox, checked by default, controlling whether an operator can skip the question.
• A Remove link, available as long as more than one question remains (you can't remove down to zero questions).

Every survey starts with one blank question already in the list. If you remove and re-add questions, they're renumbered sequentially so the internal question IDs stay clean (q1, q2, q3, and so on). This doesn't affect anything you see, it just keeps the data tidy.

Save Draft vs. Send to network

Two buttons sit at the bottom, alongside Cancel:

• Save draft writes the survey with nothing sent yet. It appears in the Surveys row as a Draft tile, and you (or another admin) can come back later to edit it via the detail view, send it, or delete it.
• Send to network saves the survey and immediately sends it in the same action. You'll see a confirmation like "Sent, delivered to N operators." If the save succeeds but the send fails for some reason, you'll see: "Survey saved as draft but send failed: [reason]." The survey still exists as a draft, so nothing is lost; you can retry the send from the detail view.

Sending fans out an in-app notification to every active operator in the group. Each operator sees the survey title and question count in their own IQ notifications, with a link straight into their surveys section to answer it. This is a one-time push at send time, not a recurring reminder; there's no repeat-nag on a survey that's still open.

The survey lifecycle: draft, active, closed

Every survey moves through three states:

• Draft: created but not sent. Not visible to operators at all. Can be edited by re-opening the author flow, sent, or deleted.
• Active: sent, and either has no close date or the close date hasn't arrived yet. Operators can answer it. Admins can close it manually at any time.
• Closed: either the close date has passed, or an admin closed it early. New responses are rejected once a survey is closed.

The detail view

Clicking a survey tile (from the Surveys screen, not the read-only Reports summary) opens its detail modal. It shows:

• Pattern: "Sent to network (aggregated)" for a Network Survey, or "Template for [franchisees'/members'] teams" for a Team Template.
• Status: "Draft (not yet sent)"; or "Active, sent [date]" plus "closes [date]" if a close date is set; or "Closed [date]."
• Every question, with its type, whether it's required or optional, and the response count so far.

For sent surveys, each question also shows its response breakdown as a set of horizontal bars, one per answer option, with the count and percentage for each. If a question has too few responses to show a safe breakdown, you'll see: "Response breakdown stays hidden until at least N operators answer, so individual responses can't be identified. [current] of [N] so far." The response count itself still shows even while the breakdown is withheld; this is the same anonymity floor used elsewhere across HQ, not a bug. Once a sent question genuinely has zero responses yet, it reads: "No responses yet. The aggregator cron updates these counts on its next pass once operators answer from their IQ surveys section." Response counts update on that same rolling cadence, so don't expect a number to move the instant an operator submits; it can take a little while to show up.

The actions available in the detail view depend on status:

• Draft: Delete draft (removes it entirely; can't be undone) and Send to network (sends it right away, same as Send to network in the author modal).
• Active: Close now (immediately marks the survey closed; no more responses are accepted after this).
• Closed: read-only. No further actions.

All of these are admin-only. Anyone in the group can open a survey tile to view it, but the send, close, and delete controls only render for group admins.

Team Templates

A Team Template is written the same way HQ writes a Network Survey (same question types, same starter pack picker in spirit), but instead of sending it to operators, it's a pattern franchisees can pull down and run with their own teams whenever they want. HQ never sees a single response from a Team Template survey; only how many distinct operators have adopted it rolls up to the Surveys tile ("N franchisees adopted · N questions").

Who can do what

Every group member who can reach the Broadcast/Surveys screen can view the hero stats and every survey tile, including response counts and breakdowns. Two things are gated to admin members:

1. Authoring: the + New survey button, and everything inside the author modal, only renders for admins.
2. Managing a sent or draft survey: Send, Close now, and Delete draft in the detail view only render for admins.

If you don't see these controls, your account isn't set to admin for this group.

How this stays on the aggregates-only side of the privacy boundary

• HQ writes the questions and reads the aggregated distribution per question. It never sees which operator gave which answer, on a Network Survey or a Team Template.
• Response breakdowns are withheld below a minimum-respondent floor, so a small network can't be reverse-engineered down to an individual operator's answer from the histogram alone. The total response count still shows; only the per-answer split is held back.
• Team Template adoption is reported as a count of distinct operators, never a list of which ones.
• Sending a survey delivers an in-app notification only. It doesn't hand HQ any new visibility into an operator's account beyond the notification itself.

Related

• /help/hq-reports-overview
• /help/hq-other-reports-cohort-compliance-recruitment
• /help/hq-network-privacy-boundary