When using the advanced option: single link, in the collect responses step. Is there a way to bypass the email sent to the respondent after they log in? Allowing the respondent to login and immediately start the survey, or is the email required?
This is a pretty common question so thanks for asking it!
I think it’s important to point out why the default functionality works the way that it does. By default, when using the single link functionality, respondents will enter their name and email address into a form and will then receive an email that contains their unique link to take the survey. This means that a respondent cannot impersonate another respondent and preserves the privacy of respondents.
If this is not the flow that you would like to see, there are a few options available to you:
- You don’t need to use the single link functionality if you (or the organisation you are working with) can run their own mail merge. The way that you would do that is to export the respondent list and use the unique links contained in the respondent list in order to run a mail merge such that each respondent will receive an email with their own unique link. For reminder emails you would then need to repeat the process but removing everyone with the “Submitted” status from the file.
- Under Edit -> Collect Responses -> Advanced Options you can change the default settings so that instead of email you use another field to verify respondents. For example, enter employee ID as the Identifying Information. Then you will want to include employee ID as the name of an additional attribute in the respondent list. Respondents will then be verified by name and employee id and won’t receive an email. They will go straight to their response on entering that private information. Generally you will want to set Name Autocompletion to Yes in this scenario too.
- It’s possible to also set up the Single Link option so that respondents enter their name and email and then just go straight to their response. To do this, just enter something other than “email” for the Identifying Information but which represents email. For example, enter “your email in lowercase” here and then add a column in the Respondent List called “your email in lowercase” in which you would include all the respondents’ emails in lowercase. With that setup the respondent can enter their name and email and go straight to their response…beware the privacy implications though and the fact that someone could impersonate another respondent.
@apitts Is there a way to only collect an Employee ID and not a name when using single link functionality? I have a client that doesn’t use email (thus using single link) and has a workforce that becomes more distrustful when they believe identifying information (like their name) is attached to a survey. Employee ID alone is considered to be safe.
@Weeve No, I’m afraid there is not the ability to use any identifier you want. The way that it works is that name is the identifier and then you have the ability to specify any additional piece of information to validate that identify (e.g. employee id) where that piece of information comes from the respondent list.
What you could do is distribute the unique links by a means other than email (for example text message). You can download the respondent list to Excel and that list includes the unique links of everyone which you could then distribute via text message say thereby skipping the single link option (or reducing the number of people that you need to use it for).