Distributing your survey
A survey goes live when you create a distribution. There’s no separate publish step — until a distribution exists, nobody can answer.
Each distribution is a separate channel with its own link, its own limits and its own pinned version of the survey, so you can run several at once and tell their responses apart.
The kinds of distribution
Link — a public URL, also available as a QR code. Anyone with it can answer. The one to use for social posts, posters and mailing lists you don’t control.
Email — paste a list of addresses, write a subject and message, and Indacas sends each recipient their own invitation. You can see who has responded.
If the survey belongs to a study or organisation, you also get:
Study members — send to the research team of the owning study.
Records — send to the study’s records, collecting answers about each record rather than from an anonymous respondent. This is how a longitudinal study runs its waves, and equally how you collect repeated measurements against samples or sites that nobody logs in as. See Records.
Organisation members — send to the members of the owning organisation.
A study’s participant flow also distributes surveys, for the questionnaires that form part of joining. See Onboarding flows.
Setting one up
Every distribution takes a name (yours, for telling them apart) and optional notes visible only to survey members. Then:
- Max responses — stop after this many. Empty means no limit.
- Expiry date — stop accepting after this date. Empty means never.
- Require authentication — respondents must sign in first.
- Allow multiple — whether one recipient can answer more than once.
See Capping and screening responses.
Versions are pinned
Creating a distribution snapshots the survey as it stands and pins the distribution to that version, shown as v1, v2 and so on in the list. People answering through it always see that version, whatever you edit afterwards.
To get changes out to people, create a new distribution — the old one carries on unchanged for anyone mid-response. See Editing a live survey.
Tracking and closing
The Distribute tab lists every distribution with its type, pinned version, status (draft, active or expired), response count and expiry. Link distributions have a copy-link action. Expiring one closes it immediately without touching the responses already collected.
Automatic distributions
A study can send surveys without you doing it each time. An automatic rule says who gets the survey and when:
- Who — participants, members or free-standing records, narrowed by conditions on their record’s fields (“age is more than 65 years ago”, “consent status is complete”).
- When — either when a record matches, firing as soon as a record is created or updated and meets the criteria, or on a date, firing a set number of days after a date field on the record or after the record was created.
- Repeating — a rule can recur every N days, counted either from the previous distribution or from completion of the previous survey.
Rules can be previewed against your existing records before you turn them on, so you can see who would be caught, and applied retroactively to records that already qualify. Unlike a one-off distribution, a rule picks up the latest version of the survey each time it fires.