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External Participants

An external participant is somebody outside the organization who can be sent a survey — a customer, a supplier, a contractor, an auditor. They have no user account and never log in.

External participants are maintained as their own list so they can be reused across surveys, rather than re-typed every time a customer satisfaction survey goes out.

Fields​

  • Code / Name
    The participant's identity in the system.

  • Contact preference
    E-mail or Phone. This decides which contact field is mandatory — and whether invitations are sent automatically.

  • E-mail
    Required when the contact preference is e-mail.

  • Phone
    Required when the contact preference is phone.

  • In participant pool
    Marks the participant as part of the reusable pool for future surveys.

How invitations work​

When a survey is published, each new external participant on its distribution list gets a participation record with a unique access token, and:

Contact preferenceWhat happens
E-mailAn invitation e-mail is sent automatically, containing the participant's personal link.
PhoneThe record and working link are created, but nothing is sent. You must share the link manually.
caution

There is no SMS integration. A participant whose contact preference is phone will never be contacted by the system — if you set up a survey for phone-preference participants and wait, nobody will answer, because nobody was told.

Access tokens​

Each participation record carries its own token, and the token is what identifies the participant when they open the link. Consequences worth knowing:

  • The link is personal. Forwarding it lets somebody else answer as that participant.
  • The token is created once per survey-and-participant pair and never changes.
  • Responses remain attributable even though nobody logged in.

Building the participant pool​

  1. Open Survey Management → External Participants and choose New.
  2. Enter the name and set the contact preference.
  3. Fill in the matching contact field.
  4. Mark in participant pool if this participant should be offered on future surveys.
  5. Save.

Limitations to plan around​

  • A survey cannot be published to external participants alone. At least one internal distribution entry is required.
  • Removing an external participant from a distribution list does not revoke a link that has already been issued.
tip

Keep the participant list clean. An external participant record with a stale e-mail address produces a silently undelivered invitation and a response rate you will misread as disinterest.