How to set up surveys for non-platform member sample

To ensure non-platform members can access surveys, follow the steps below.

Should you wish to run a survey purely to respondents who do not have an account on the platform, you need to make sure that you do not have a consumer group selected on the 'Sample' tab:

External Sample

You then need to press 'Get an open link' under the open link header:

Get Open Link

Once you have selected to create your open link, and have saved the sample on this page, go to the 'Settings' tab and complete some additional settings.

Additional open link survey settings

You need to set the completed actions for your survey and also set the branding options:

Additional Open Link Settings

Completion actions

You can set different actions whether a respondent completes the survey, is routed out on a quota as they don't meet the survey criteria, or is routed out on a quota as you have reached your sample target for that criteria. For each of these you can:

'Return to homepage' - redirect the user to the login page of the platform
'Follow link' - Redirect the user to a specific link (this includes the option of passback links used by sample providers)
'Show message' - Show them a plain text message
'Promote account' - Enable them to join the platform as a member and create an account using 'Promote account'

You simply need to pick the option from the drop-down list for each status and then complete the relevant section.

Branding options

For surveys going to respondents without accounts on the platform, you can opt to remove the site branded header space and footer from the survey. The colours used within the platform will be maintained (as will the URL) but the logos and footer links you use on the platform won't be displayed. You can also specify text to show in the footer space (e.g. link to privacy policy, survey prize draw terms and conditions etc.).

Expected URL Variables

If you have selected ‘Get an open link’ on the survey ‘sample’ tab, you can copy the link that displays on the ‘invite’ tab and send this out directly to your customers, or publish this link, for example, on social media or on another website. When used in this way, each respondent will use the same open link and their responses will be anonymous in the data set.

When sending out an open link to a survey through a CRM system, you might wish to add additional data to the end of the link you send out to respondents, for example, a unique code which identifies each customer, or demographic information. For this to be recorded in the survey data export you need to specify the field (data) that you would like the data file to collect.

To work, the link must be formatted in the following way:

Original survey link - https://platform.flexmr.org/oa/5699f4

Link containing additional data - https://platform.flexmr.org/oa/5699f4?SOMETHING=SOMETHING

e.g. - https://platform.flexmr.org/oa/5699f4?ID=123456

You can also add more than one piece of data, for example:

https://platform.flexmr.org/oa/5699f4?gender=female&region=london

In the data set, the variable will be the header of the column and the information after the = would be the value which has pulled through from the CRM for each respondent.

To prevent unintended information being added to the data set, the system will not record any data which is shown after the end of the link unless this has been set as an ‘expected URL variable’ in the survey settings.

In the examples above, ‘id’ or 'gender' and 'region' would each need to be added to the expected URL variables section of the survey for the related data to pull through into the survey data download.

To do this, click the ‘+ Add Variable’ button and type the name of the variable that will be collected in the survey results. This tells the platform what to expect and record in your results download.

We recommend that you test the live survey before sending your links out to the respondents to make sure that your variables are showing correctly in the data download.

Uploading a list of people to invite

Should you wish to use the platform to send out an email to a list of potential respondents, you will also need to upload a CSV to the survey to do this.