Invite Participants By Email

To invite participants via email, follow these steps:

1. Click on the "Surveys" tab located at the top of the administrative user interface.

2. Select the Survey for which you want to invite participants in the list of Surveys below the "Surveys" small tab located on the left hand side of the administrative user interface.

3. Click on the "Manage" button.

4. In the new window that opened, click on the "Invite" button to launch the invitation wizard that will let you enter the participants' name and email address, and compose your invitation message.

Step 1 - Invitation Message Template

This step will only appear if you created invitation message templates. You can optionnaly select an invitation message template to use to send the invitations.

You can also schedule invitations for a later date by entering a date and time in the "Schedule For" field.

You can also set an expiration date for the invitations by entering a date and time in the "Expire On" field.

Step 2 - Languages of the invitation message

If your account has only one language, you will automatically proceed to the next step.

If your account is multilingual, select the language(s) in which you want to send your invitation message and press the  button

You can select the order in which the languages will appear in your invitation message using the button and button.

Step 3 - The information that you will provide for the participants to invite

In this step, select the information fields you will provide for each participant to be invited. To invite participants by email, you at least need to select the Email field the first and last name are optional. You can select any data point from the survey to pre-fill some information.

You can make the invitations anonymous by checking the "Anonymous Invitations" checkbox. When checked, the personal information you enter in the invitation wizard will be used to generate personalized email invitations, bu the personal information will not be stored, thus it is no possible to link a set of responses to a participant invited by email.

You can also add participants without sending an invitation message by checking the "Do not send email invitations, save the participant information only" checkbox.

Step 4 - Enter the participants' information

In this step, for each participant you want to invite, provide the information for each field selected in the previous step. The information for each participant must be entered on a separate line. The different values for each participant must be separated by commas. For example: John,Doe,john.doe@internet.com.

You can import the list of participants to invite using an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet must have a first row that contains the field labels of each field you selected in the previous step in separate columns. The information for each participant then appears on separate rows.

Step 5 - Pre-populated Responses for All Participants Invited

This step allows you to pre-fill information for all the participants being invited. The same information will be used for each participant invited.

Step 6 - Invitation Message(s) Layout

The "Invitation Email Sender Name" field contains the text that will be used as the sender's name in the email.

The "Invitation Email Reply To Email Address" is the email address to which replies to invitation messages will be sent if a participant clicks the "reply" button when they get the invitation email.

There is a tab for each language you selected to include in your invitation message. A default invitation message template (or the invitation message template selected in step 1) will appear for each language you selected in the first step. The invitation message template contains the Special Tags that will be replaced with the personalized values of each participant when sending the invitation message. Each Special Tag is framed with the "$$" characters.

To add Special Tags in your invitation message template, follow these steps:

1. In the message template, position the cursor/caret where you want to add the Special Tag.
2. Select the field for which you want to add the Special Tag in the "Fields" list.
3. Click on the "Add" button.
4. The Special Tag will appear in your invitation message template and will be replaced with its value when the personalized invitation message is sent to each participant invited.

By default invitation messages are sent in plain text. You can send them in HTML format by clicking the "Send invitation email in HTML format".

If you selected an invitation message template in step 1 and you have made changes to the template in the wizard, you can check the "Update the message template" checkbox to save your changes to the invitation message template.

Special Tags available in invitation messages

The following Special Tags are available in invitation messages. All the values for fields/questions in the survey can also be used in invitation messages. However, these fields will only have a value if you have initialized them.