Hello. If I use LimeSurvey, it would be to offer surveys (and a feedback report of my own design) to individual and corporate clients. What would I need to keep in mine when providing access to a survey through a payment module of our design? What kinds of handoffs would be necessary for a paid customer to be given rights to a unique survey to be taken and stored under her/his own information?

Thank you in advance for helping me think through this problem.

Dear otfglenn,
there are surely many approaches to connect an panel/incentive system to limesurvey, however I can give you a brief overview of how our system is currently working. This approach allows you to manage the visibility and accessibility of surveys through your panel/incentive system, limesurvey is only used as a pure survey programming tool.

Most important thing you will need to consider, if the panellist database is entirely separated from limesurvey: You will need to work with redirect-links to interchange information between both systems!

For our panel we basically use three variables for the redirects:
A.) Participant ID (unique identifier)
B.) Survey ID (to identify correct survey)
C.) Survey status categories:
C1.) Completes (participant will get full incentive)
C2.) Screen-outs (participant will not get any incentive)
C3.) Late screen-outs (participant will get some incentive for a long screening questionnaire)
C4.) Quota full (participant will not get any incentives)

The reason to differentiate screen-outs from quota full is mainly for statistical purposes, as you can than calculate the real incidence rate to get a better understanding of your target groups and to be able to calculate an appropriate price per interview.

First Step: Transfer variables A and B from your panel/incentive system to limesurvey
To identify a panellist in limesurvey (e.g. panellist with ID ZZZZZ) and redirect to the correct survey, you would need at least one hidden questions (e.g. short text) in your survey for the participant ID. Assuming the survey id in limesurvey is 22, the group id of the hidden question is 33 and the question id is 44, the limesurvey SGQA code would be 22X33X44. The link to the limesurvey questionnaire for the panellist with ID ZZZZZ would then need to look something like this:
In your panel system backend, you would then need to have the possibility to assign a (automatically generated) panel link to the survey-link of limesurvey. E.g. the panel/incentive frontend would show this link to panellist which would be redirected to
I.e. there must be a possibility to connect the following information within the panel system backend:
“surveyid” of panel/incentive system (=22)  “sid“ of limesurvey
“id” of panel/incentive system (=ZZZZZ)  “sid“ of limesurvey

Second Step: Transfer variables A, B and C from limesurvey to your panel/incentive system
Having the four survey status options in mind, you will now need for different redirect links to assign the status to the participant in your panel/incentive system. In limesurvey you can use {INSERTANS:SGQA} in the redirect links, which allows adding the response to a specific question in the survey to the final url. So in our example the four different links could look like the following.

For completes (end-url in limesurvey):
For screen-outs (redirect link in limesurvey quotas with limit = 0):
For late screen-outs (redirect link in limesurvey quotas with limit = 0, e.g. after 10th question):
For quota full (redirect link in limesurvey quotas with limit = n):
Having this basic system in mind, your panel/incentive system concept can be adapted easily to limesurvey.
Hope this helps a bit!

Cheers,
Tim