Hello,

I need to create a survey that someone else can send out on my behalf, and they aren't able to send individual tokenized links, so I can't use the tokens feature. I have a list of email addresses for the people who should be allowed to respond to the survey. Is there anyway to have them enter their email as the first question of the survey, and check it against the list I have (about 6000 emails)?

This is important because I have additional information about each respondent that needs to be joined to the survey data when it is completed. I've set up basic regex validation to try to avoid typos and make sure they enter the right domain, but I need to be 100% sure the email they enter matches a record in my existing data. I would really appreciate some suggestions.

Thank you!

How about using the email address as tokens? I am not sure how long tokens can be as a maximum, but I don't see any other chance, especially if you need to use information connected to these email addresses.

Easiest way would be you sending the emails directly from Limesurvey.

But you could also give them a list of token links and they would need to insert the tokens respectively. Most mass email programs should be able to do this.

If they need to send the email and CANNOT include indiviual links / tokens, another option might be to create a page before the actual survey, where people insert their email address, the system looks the email address up in a database and gives them the corresponding token link.

Thank you for the reply. I tried using the email address as tokens, but it looks like the tokens only support alphanumeric characters, so no luck there. Is there any chance I could query against the central participant database? It looks like writing some kind of preceding page that looks up their email address and then redirects to their tokenized link is the way to go.

The reason I don't send the emails varies by client. Sometimes they have confidentiality clauses in their contracts that prevent me from contacting their list. Sometimes they just aren't comfortable with a third party contacting their customers. Whether the client has access to a mailing system varies as well. I'm basically working on this solution for my toughest distribution scenario. In my experience we also get a much higher response rate if the survey comes from someone the respondent is familiar with, so there is a tangible benefit.

I agree with your last comment. It helps a lot when the invite comes from someone they know and from a known email address.

But it would be perfect if the client could send these emails with individual links, then you could just send them them a excel sheet or CSV with the token links (how to do that is described in the workarounds).

Regarding tokens and alphanumeric characters: This makes sense and was what I feared.

Reading against the central patricipant database doesn't really help, because you need the additional attributes in the token table and as far as I know, you can't read attributes form the central participant database into the survey, only token attributes. But I am not an expert in these kind of things. Let's see if someone has a better idea.