Recruit survey participants on Respondent for your study on Google Forms using the steps in this guide and automatically track participant responses using Respondent completion URLs feature.
Table of contents
Set up the survey on Google Forms
Create a new Google Form with the following 3 sections:
Section 1: Survey questions, Page 1
Section 2: Survey questions, Page 2 (optional)
Section 3: Participant ID
Section 4: End screen
If you need assistance with Google Forms, refer to Google support.
If your research requires you to obtain participant signatures for non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or other documentation, you can use Respondent’s automated document signing features, available on all subscription plans. All participants recruited through Respondent have already offered explicit consent to participate in surveys and there is usually no need to request consent via your research tool.
Add your survey questions to the ‘Section 1: Survey questions Page 1’ and ‘Section 2: Survey questions Page 1’ sections. If your survey requires further sections and skip logic, make sure that the Participant ID and End Screen sections are the last 2 sections of the form.
Open the last section of your survey, and select the Participant ID section as the next step. In the above example, open Section 2 (page 2 of survey questions), and select 'After section 2: Go to section 3 (Participant ID)' at the bottom.
Open the Participant ID section, select ‘Add Question’ and add a ‘Short answer’ type question:
“Please enter your Participant ID from Respondent”.
If you want to be able to map individual responses to specific participants, you can optionally make this a required field in your survey. Participants recruited from Respondent can obtain their Participant ID on their participant account dashboard. As a researcher, the project dashboard will contain the Participant IDs of participants who have clicked on your completion URL.
Save your form and copy the URL to collect responses to your Google Forms survey. We will return to your survey shortly, now let us set up your recruitment project in Respondent.
Set up the recruitment project on Respondent
Select ‘Survey’ or ‘Unmoderated Task’ as the methodology while setting up your project to recruit high quality participants. Refer to this guide on setting up a project on Respondent, if you new to the platform.
Paste the copied Google Forms URL in the ‘Link to task’ field of your project
Copy the automatically generated Completion Confirmation URL to your clipboard and add any special instructions you may want to pass on to your participants.
4. Proceed with your audience details and screener questions on Respondent and publish your project.
Redirect participants to Respondent upon completing the survey
Return to the Google Forms editor and open the last section. In the above example, that is “Section 4: End screen”.
Add the following message to this section:
'Important: Please follow the 2 steps below to record your survey response and speed up incentive processing:
1. Open <paste the copied completion URL from your clipboard here> in a new tab. If you are not signed in to your Respondent account, please sign in to record your attendance in the Respondent platform.
2. Click the submit button on this page to save your survey responses.
If you do not click submit, your data will not be saved and you will not be eligible for the incentive.'
3. Save the Google Forms survey and return to Respondent.
Invite qualified and screened participants to your Google Forms survey
Review and invite participants who have applied to your project and are qualified according to your screener questions
Track completes in project dashboard and pay
As invited participants complete your survey and click on the completion URL, you can review their status on your Project Dashboard, under the Completes Tab.
You can select participants in bulk and pay them, with no need for individual reconciliation of responses.
Use the Participant IDs on the completes tab to map individual participants to their respective survey results, and use the messaging feature to clear up any inconsistencies or follow-ups.
Troubleshooting Google Forms + Respondent integration
Participants are shown on the Completes tab, but I do not see their response on Google Forms.
The most likely explanation is that the Participant did not enter the correct Participant ID in the Google Forms field you are using to map the response to the individual participant. You can use the timestamp of the participant response in Google Forms vs. the alert from Respondent or look for similar Participant IDs to the one displayed in the Project Dashboard > Completes tab
If you are unable to reconcile an individual response to the participant, you can message the participant and inquire about the specific response to identify their submission record. You could also ask them to redo the task, if tracking the response down is unsuccessful.
If you need further assistance using Google Forms with Respondent’s completion URLs, please contact us via the help widget inside your account.