2. Enabling Survey Participant Management
To make access control work, you need to enable Survey participants, create a list of participants, generate the actual token codes, and invite participants with their token.

Enabling Survey Participants

You can enable tokens at any time, you do not have to have finalized or activated the survey first. To start the process, you need to click the button "Survey participants" from your survey summary page.



You will see an information screen with a warning that If you initialise a survey participant table for this survey then this survey will only be accessible to users who provide a token either manually or by URL. 

Press the Initialise Participant Table button when you are sure you want to proceed.

The Survey Participant Summary Screen

On this screen, you'll see summary information about your participants. The menu along the top gives you access to the following features:


1. Display Participants: Takes you to a screen where you can look up participants, check their survey status, sending individual invitations and reminders, and edit their records.
2. Create... : Provides you with ways to create participant records, including manual data entry or importing from a CSV file.
3. Manage attributes: Let's you create custom fields (attributes) for any custom data you want to import or associate with your participants
4. Export: Lets you export participants
5. Invitations and Reminders: Includes access to edit your email message templates, along with manual ability to send bulk invitations and reminders to participants.
6. Generate tokens: Participant records must have a token if you want to send them invitations and reminders (or in fact, what them to participate at all). You need to request the creation of these tokens (this lets you import participants and exclude them from emails until you create the tokens).




Create a list of participants

For now, click the Create... button. You can now create a record for each participant. By default, the Participant Record has three attributes with information on the participant, containing first name, last name and email address. The other fields are used within the system to keep track of email address validity, invitation and reminder emails, validity periods, etc. You do not have to enter anything other then the names and email address, although you might want to define a period of validity.

Importing a large number of Participants

In theory, you can use this form to create a record for each participant, but with large surveys it is often faster to import participants from a CSV file. Search our KB for Importing participants from a CSV file to learn more.

Creating Custom Attributes

If you have additional information about your participants that you would like to add to the tokens, you can do this with custom attributes. Search our KB for Additional token options to learn more.

Generating token strings

Once your participant table is ready, you need to generate the actual tokens, if you have not set them manually. Click the Generate tokens button to have the system generate a random 15 character token for each participant. This is the ‘access code’ respondents have to enter to fill out a survey.

If you send invitations through the Participant manager, the token is automatically added to the survey URL and respondents should never have to fill it out themselves. However, you could also create your own token values and import them as part of your Participant list. One example where this might be useful is if respondents can also fill out a paper survey, and the token needs to match the survey code of the paper version.


Disabling Participants Table

If you accidentally created a Closed survey when you activated your survey, your participants will be asked for a token to access the survey: you may wish to disable this. 

To do so, go to the Survey Participants page, and you'll see a red button at the top right of the page: Delete participants table. Click this to remove the participant table, and your survey will no longer require a token to gain access.


Creating Tokens without Email Addresses

There may be cases where you want to have a closed survey, but instead of sending invites from the platform, you'd like to share out access tokens to a third party. 

To create dummy participant records, you can follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your account, go to your survey, and then go to the "Participants" section.

  2. Click on the "Create" button.

  3. Choose "Create dummy participants"

  4. In the field "Number of participants" specify how may participant token records you want.

  5. Click on the "Save" button to create the dummy participant records.

You'll now have a set of participant records with generated access token equal to the number of records you specified to create.

You can now click on the "Export" button and the click the "Download CSV file" button. 

This CSV file can be shared with a third party who will presuambly send your email invitations. That email will need to include your survey URL and the access token. 

Remember each token is for a unique participant, don't share the same token with multiple people!

Participants can return to their incomplete survey by using their access token to reload their responses. 

Don't forget to activate your survey before you ask people to complete and complete it!

We greatly appreciate your feedback.




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