Gift Cards

Gift Card Incentives

Initial Considerations

REDCap projects can support the distribution of gift cards as compensation for participating in a study. However, it is important to know that it is not without caution. Please keep these concepts in mind as you plan your study:

• REDCap doesn't expose the IP address for the client response to an anonymous survey or have the ability to ban an IP address manually.
• REDCap will ban an IP if it hits a threshold of 600 connections in 60 seconds.
• It is highly suggested that you seek an admin review (re-charge fee required) of a submission to set a status before sending any codes for gift cards if you intend to disburse gift card codes automatically especially for public surveys
• For an automated gift card system to work best it may need to be separated into two projects.
  • the first project would be the public capture of the registration where spam submission still may happen
  • the second project handles the dispersal of the gift cards which is a manual process.
• Make sure you enable the Google captcha on the public survey to cut down on spam submissions.
• Use of additional branching logic before sending anything automatically for gift cards is also advisable

The Process
There are many ways to design a survey project to meet your needs. Below is one method:

Creating anonymous surveys for incentives -

1. Make the survey optional non-anonymous (i.e. put a field at the end something like "Please enter your email if you'd like to be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift card as a thank you for participating in this study" Then you can do a drawing and email the winner(s). People who don't want to list their email don't have to.
2. Use branching logic to populate a link to a gift card for every Nth participant. Organize hidden fields that will count # of responses, then create N fields for N # gift cards you'd like to give out, each with a link to a gift card that populates at the end of the survey.

Additional Considerations
BMIC REDCap team can offer additional (recharge) support for Gift Card Projects such as:

• Investigating a custom method that may help solve checking legitimate versus scam emails
• Pull an IP from the web server logs to ban IPs. This is an intensive process and is after the fact when fraudulent responses start to roll in.
  • It requires us to update the REDCap host operating system firewall.

If you need assistance with this type of project, please submit a Help Desk Support ticket