How do I start my first Poll?

How it works

From your dashboard, select Start a new Poll.

You’ll choose the number of slots for this first Poll (technically your first Survey peer group, but we simplify it at this stage) and pay for it. The Poll parent is created automatically.

The names you assign to Polls and Survey peer groups are for your internal reference as a requester. They’re never visible to respondents and exist simply to help you remember the specific scope of your Poll and its Survey children.

Set your first Survey in flight

Before a Survey can collect results, two setup steps are required:

1. Associate it to a Poll model.
   The Poll model defines the data schema — the list of compensation and benefits fields you’ll collect. Salary Confidential provides pre-packaged models by broad geographic market to make setup faster. For example:

   • If you choose the U.S., you’ll see benefit options relevant to American compensation structures (retirement, healthcare, PTO).
   • If you choose the EU, you’ll see options appropriate for that market (pension scheme fields, statutory leave, etc.).

   When a Survey peer group is the first child of a new Poll, you’ll create the model as part of the initial workflow. Any additional Surveys you launch under the same Poll will reuse the existing model and skip this step.

2. Complete the Outreach interview.
   This short step helps you create an effective outreach message tailored to the peer set for this Survey. Every Survey has its own outreach message, even if multiple Surveys live under one poll.

Once the model is defined and the outreach message is ready, the Survey page will display its Share URL buttons, its invite token generator and you’ll be able to contact potential Respondents directly.

• Read What is the outreach interview and can I skip it?

Please note

• You can create additional Surveys peer groups under the same Poll at any time
• You can add more response slots to an open survey at any time (add them if you realize you'd like more data in an open survey)
• You can invite as many people as you need to get to the set number of response slots in your survey - Surveys are limited by the number of received responses, not the number of people you reach out to (this means you can have as many invitation token as you need -- but once the Survey has filled up all its response slots, it closes and an invited peer with a token won't be able to submit their own response anymore)
• You can edit a Poll’s model only while no responses to any surveys have been received. Once the first response arrives, the model locks to preserve comparability. Read more about the benefit of using a unified model per poll group
• You can regenerate outreach messages at any point while the Survey still has open slots.