Private Survey / Participant Contact List

Initial Considerations

For private surveys, use the Participant Contact List. This option allows you to send emails and track who responds to your survey. 

The Process

1. If the first instrument on the project is not a survey or you have follow-up surveys to send to participants, add a field to an instrument on the project that is designated to collect email addresses (usually works best to add it to the first instrument).  Here is how you create/edit a field to collect email addresses:

   1. Go to a form on your project and add or edit a Text Box question that asks for email address
   2. Select "Email" in the Validation box (circled in red in image below)
   3. Enter a Field Label and a Variable Name
   4. Click Save.
      
      
      
      
      
2.  Go to “Project Setup”, scroll to the “Enable optional modules and customizations” box, and click on “Enable” next to “Designate an email field to use for invitations to survey participants”  (circled in Red in image below).
             
            
   
   
   
   
3. A box like the one below will pop up.  Select an email field from the dropdown box and save (note: email addresses entered in this field will be used to send the survey(s) to).  If a field is not listed, follow the instructions on step 1 on this page.
   
                      
   
   
   
   
4. When the question asking for the email address is answered and saved, it will automatically be listed in the “Participant List” (Circled in green below).  This is located in “Survey Distribution Tools” (Circled in Orange below).
   1. Participants emails will appear either:
      1. being added as a list on this first page (purple button)- this only appears if the email field is located on a survey which is the 1st instrument, or
      2. when a new record is created and an email is entered in the email field
         
         
         
         
5. To send the survey(s) to participants, select the survey from the event box (circled in red above) and click on “Compose survey Invitations”.  A box similar to the one below will pop up.  Select all the email addresses you would like to send the survey to (located on the right side of the box), enter the Subject (located on the left side of the box), fill out anything else in the box you feel is necessary, and click "Send Emails" (located at the bottom right corner of the box).
   
               
    
   
   
6. The surveys have now been sent, if you want to view who they have been sent to, go back to the "Participant List".  It will mark the participants you sent the email to by putting an envelope with a green check mark in the "Invitation Sent" column (circled in red below).  It also keeps track of which participants have responded by putting with a green check mark next to their email address (circled in orange below)
    

Additional Considerations

The participant list is not the only way to distribute surveys. The Public Survey is another option (often meant for anonymous surveys). However, surveys can also be distributed via email in REDCap by opening individual records, navigating to the survey, and either opening (for in-person data collection) or sending an individual invitation. Furthermore, surveys can be scheduled using Automated Survey Invitations (ASI) to occur at specific points, this feature works great for follow-up surveys.