Send out a survey invite every other Thursday to a participant list

Hi,

There is no way to set that up only with the native scheduling options. I think someone had a similar request for cron expressions a while ago but I can’t find it.

The way to go around this is to have a workflow firing every day (or every Thursday in your case), a code task to check if the day is a valid distribution day and a workflow condition set up to stop or continue based on the code task result.

For your use case, it would look like this:

Not extensively tested, but your code task should be something like this:

function codeTask() {
  const startingThursday = '2026-01-01'; // Change to your actual starting Thursday

  function isDistributionThursday(startDate) {
    const today = new Date();

    if (today.getDay() !== 4) return false;

    const start = new Date(startDate);
    start.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);
    const now = new Date(today);
    now.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);

    const diffInMs = now - start;
    const diffInDays = Math.round(diffInMs / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24));

    return diffInDays >= 0 && diffInDays % 14 === 0;
  }

  return {
    result: isDistributionThursday(startingThursday)
  };
}

https://community.qualtrics.com/survey-platform-54/custom-cron-expression-33065

​@vgayraud that was me with the custom cron expression and it didn't work out at all... I contacted Q support and they escalated it up to their engineers and they gave the blanket answer of "it's not intended to work that way." Not only did it not work it misfired, paying no attention to the date range and seemed to have stopped reading the code at the "4“ (for day of the week, 1-7)and ended up sending all 3 distributions at the exact same time. I need to go back into that post and write a follow up. 

Because of that issue I got my stakeholders onboard with just 1 survey instead of two and (what I thought would be) simplifying the cadence. I think for the time being I may just manually set a few distributions and continue to mess around with it until I can get it working.

​@Qualtrics_BD_Team see thread. There should be some sort of out of the box function to trigger on recurrent day of the week, but skip on week (ie every other Thursday in my case). 

I’m sorry to hear that. :(

I completely agree with you that more flexibility on the out of the box scheduling would be great.

However, I’ll go against support here and confirm that it is absolutely possible to design custom scheduling based on code tasks. I’ve set up much more complex things with success (for example, dynamically sending out invitations every week day until 4 business days before the end of each month, taking into account holidays stored in an array and having a completely schedule for December).

I’m going to try out your code in testing and see how it performs, thanks so much ​@vgayraud