Adding passwords to surveys

Adding a password to your survey can be useful if you invite contacts via your own email tool or via paper invitations, yet you want to be able to match the responses to the respondents or you want to pass metadata into the survey. At the same time, you are sure that only the people you have emailed or written will have access to your survey.

There are three ways in which your contacts can sign into the survey:

  1. Using a combination of a user ID and password.
  2. Using only a password where the password is generated automatically by the Agile Research platform.
  3. Using only a password where you decide the passwords.

When you want to make use of the third option, make sure that each password is unique – no two people may use the same password – and that you import the password in custom field 1.

Generating a unique ID and password

Agile Research will generate a unique ID and password combination for each contact that you import into your survey. Before following the steps below, prepare your Excel file. Make sure that you add all metadata to this file that you wish to use in your analysis. When you want to set your own passwords, add these to a separate column. This column will be imported into custom field 1.

  1. Open your survey.
  2. Select Distribute > Add / Remove channel.
  3. Select Paper and Contacts.

  4. Click Save.

  5. Go back to Distribute and select Paper. You will now see the following options:

    Paper options.

  6. Select Contacts and import your contacts without an email address. When making use of your own passwords, assign this column to custom field 1.

Download sign-in codes

Once the import is finished, click this option to download the unique IDs and passwords of all of your contacts. You can use this file for a mail merge with your own email tool or Microsoft Word. When using a password-only sign-in option, you can simply ignore the ID column.

Sign-in page URL

Select Sign-in page URL to obtain the URL of the sign-in page. This link will be the same for all contacts. Only their (ID and) passwords will be unique.

  1. Select the sign-in type. You will notice the URL changes slightly depending on the selected type:

    Type.

  2. If you have your own domain or subdomain set up, you can select it from the dropdown menu next to Base Domain.

  3. Once you have selected the sign-in type, copy and paste the URL in your mailing.

Personalize the sign-in page URL, especially when sending invitations via paper. Respondents will need to manually type in the URL and having one with a lot of letters and numbers can be quite confusing. You can personalize a URL using Agile Research. You can also generate a short URL. Always select the sign-in type prior to setting the personalized or short URL. The URL you set will take the selected type into account.

Sign-in page

Here, you can modify the content and layout of the sign-in page. If you are using a theme for your survey, the sign-in page will automatically adopt this theme.

Click Preview in the top-right corner of this page to see what the sign-in page will look like