You can use several sources of respondents for your questionnaire. We call them survey channels. There are three basic types of channels:
Public link
You only need to publish the survey link on your website, Facebook, Twitter or send it to your respondents. Every person who knows the survey link can enter the questionnaire, there is no access restriction. Responses are anonymous, there is no way how to connect responses with respondents and no personalization is possible.
My sample
Use this option to import your own database of respondents. The system generates an unique link for each respondent so the access to the questionnaire will be allowed only to people from your database.
You can define an authorization URL to send respondents to authorize on your website first. They will be able to enter the questionnaire only if they successfully log in on your website with correct user name/password). This option is useful if you implement your own online panels. Some panel
system require secret key/token for authorization. Please contact our helpdesk if you need to include secret key to the procedure.
How to import your database: after a channel is created click on “Import” tab. Put column names in the first row.
External sample
Choose external sample if you want to use external panels of respondents or other databases with external authorization.
Each respondent must enter the survey with an unique “resp” parameter. You will find the correct URL address after creating the external sample channel. URL template:
http://www.opensurvey.com/survey/account_number/project_number/channel_number?resp=XXXX
Add “eraseAll=True” parameter to delete the session:
http://www.opensurvey.com/survey/account_number/project_number/channel_number?resp=XXXX&eraseAll=True
Emailing
Import file with list of your respondents must be a CSV format, one row per each respondent. Use comma as a divider.
If you insert “id_resp” variable, put it in the first column, otherwise it will be generated by the system.
Include emails only if you want to send email invitations. The column with emails must be named “email”.
If you need to insert personalized data, use brackets with relevant column name [surname] from the import file. To insert the personalized questionnaire link use [SAMPLE_LINK] for an absolute path http://www.opensurvey.com/… or [SAMPLE_LINK_RELATIVE] for a relative path (you need to include your domain http://www.yoursite.com/[SAMPLE_LINK_RELATIVE]
Quotas
You can define quotas for your sample or specific survey channels . If the quota limit is exceeded, the survey system sends user to the end page called “QUOTA FULL PAGE” and changes the value of the [IS:QUOTAFULL] variable to True.
After you create a quota, the count is zero, even if the survey is live and there are several responses. Click on “recalculate quota” to synchronize it with current results.