How to write a check-in question a pastor would actually answer.

The fastest way to ruin a monthly check-in is to make it feel like an HR survey. Volunteers respond to surveys like they respond to dentist forms: warily, briefly, and only if they have to. They respond to a question from a pastor who actually wants to know like they respond to a friend over coffee.

The question is the whole game. Most of what makes Pulsily work is upstream of the software: the prompt itself. Here are three rules we’ve landed on after watching hundreds of check-ins go well and several go badly.

1. Name the rhythm, not the metric

Bad: On a scale of 1 to 5, how engaged are you feeling?
Good: How are you really doing this week?

The bad version asks the volunteer to do work the leader should be doing: translate her weekend into a number. The good version asks her to tell the truth in her own words. It also tells her something about you — that you’d rather have her real answer than her averaged answer.

Scaled questions are not bad. They’re useful for tracking trends across a team, and you should have one in every check-in. But the lead question — the one she answers first — should sound like a friend, not a form.

2. Leave room for the real answer

Most check-in tools push you toward multiple choice for the sake of analytics. Pulsily defaults to a free-text answer for the lead question because the analytics on free text are worth more than the analytics on a number.

When you let a volunteer answer in her own words, she will sometimes write fine, and that’s fine. But she will also sometimes write my mom is having heart surgery on May 3rd, and you cannot get that from a multiple-choice question, ever.

We have a name for this in the product: a signal. Pulsily quietly flags answers like the heart-surgery one for follow-up, not because of keyword detection, but because we ask leaders to tag urgent answers themselves when they read them. The signal is human; the structure is software.

3. Ask less than you think

The single most common pastor mistake is asking too many questions. Five questions won’t get you five thoughtful answers — they’ll get you five short answers, or two thoughtful answers and three skips, or worse, an unsubscribe.

Two questions is the right number. One scaled question for trending. One free-text question for the real answer. Pulsily lets you build more if you want; we strongly suggest you don’t.

The leader who answers two good questions every month for a year has told you twenty-four true things about her year. The leader who skips a five-question form every month has told you nothing.

The template we ship with

Our default template is called Pastoral Heart. It has two questions:

1. How are you really doing this week? (Scale of 1 to 5.)
2. Anything weighing on you?

That’s it. We have not yet had a church tell us this is not enough. Most tell us, after the first cycle, that it’s the most honest thing their leaders have ever told them about how they’re actually doing.

Write your own when you’re ready. Until then — try ours.

Want more? We keep a library of 40+ example questions across spiritual, team, personal, and accountability categories — field-tested, free to steal.