Qualtrics Tutorials: Sending Respondents a Copy of their Survey

Sometimes, your respondents may wish to have a copy of their survey responses, or they may wish to receive confirmation that their survey response was received. This is especially true if you are using a Qualtrics survey for a "higher-stakes" form, such as an application form or a feedback form. As the survey creator, there are two options you can use to make it easy for respondents to save a report of their responses and/or receive an email confirmation that their response was received.

This method changes the end-of-survey outcome so that instead of seeing a simple thank-you message, the user is shown a report of their responses that can be printed or saved to PDF. This approach can be used alone or in conjunction with sending a confirmation email (method 2 below).

When to use: You want respondents to see a summary report of their answers upon completing the survey that can be printed or saved as a PDF.

Directions

1. In the survey editor, scroll to the end of your survey. Click the End of Survey box to make the Edit end of survey options appear in the sidebar. Click the End of survey message dropdown, then click Include response summary.

If you have a branching survey with multiple ending outcomes, you can also apply this option to individual End of Survey elements in the Survey Flow.

This method requires you to put a question on your survey collecting person’s email address. It then uses Email Triggers and Piped Text to send the person their responses on survey submission.

When to use: You want respondents to be emailed a copy of their survey responses, and your survey includes a question asking their email address.

Directions

Step 1: Collect respondent email address on the survey

1. On your survey, create a Text Entry question that will collects the user’s email address. In the sidebar (question options) menu, make sure that Text Type is set to Single Line. Turn on the option Add Validation; then in the dropdown box that appears, choose Content Type. Under Content Type, click Email Address. (This will check that the text entered in the box matches the pattern of a valid email address.)

   

   If you are using Text Entry "Form" question type (which has multiple text boxes in a single question), click the link "Click here to edit form fields", which appears below the last text box.

   

   This will allow you to set the validation type for each box individually. Set the validation type for any boxes that will contain email addresses to Valid Email Address. When finished, click "Back to preview mode" to save your changes.

   

Step 2: Set up email triggers

1. In the left navigation menu, click Survey Options > Post-Survey. Locate Manage Email Triggers, then click Edit Triggers.

   

2. In the Triggers window, click Add Another Trigger.

   1. In the Message area, click on the “{a}” icon to open the Piped Text menu. Mouseover the “Survey Question” menu item, then find the question on your survey that collects the email address. Mouse over that question, and click on the menu item that is below Question Text. (The actual text in the menu will match the prompt for the email question item.)

      

      This should generate a chunk of text in the Message box that begins with a dollar sign, followed by what looks like a file path inside of curly braces:

      

      The part inside the curly braces between q:// and /ChoiceTextEntryValue will be different for every user and for every survey. That part represents the question's internal ID number, which is specific to each individual survey. For this reason, you must use the Insert Piped Text menu (rather than copy/paste from this tutorial) to get this string.

   2. Cut and paste the piped text chunk into the To Email Address field.
   3. If you want respondents to see their full survey responses: Make sure the box next to Include Response Report is checked.
      If you simply want to send respondents a confirmation email that their responses were received: uncheck the box next to Include Response Report.

   4. You do not need to enter anything in the message text area, but it may be helpful to respondents if you remind them where these survey responses came from, and (if applicable) what follow-up steps they should expect.

      

3. When finished, click Save Triggers.

Note: The response report emailed to the respondent includes "invisible" questions, such as Timer and Meta Info questions. For "check-all-that-apply" questions, it lists only the answer choices that the user selected.

Step 3: Test to confirm that the email trigger works as expected

You have now set up email triggers for respondents. You can verify that they are working properly by going to the Survey Preview and completing the survey using your own email address in your email question. If you find an error or want to change something about the email trigger, return to Survey Options > Post-Survey: Manage Email Triggers section to edit the existing distribution.

We recommend that you test your email triggers with and without the "Include Response Report" option, so that you can see what your survey respondents will see. The information contained in the "Include Response Report" includes quite a bit of detail, and may surprise respondents if they are not expecting to see it.

Workflows (formerly called Actions) are an extremely flexible tool for task automation. Workflows are able of performing a much wider range of tasks besides sending emails on survey receipt.

This method requires you to collect respondents' email addresses at some point within the survey. This can be done by including a question in the survey directly asking the respondent to enter their email address. Alternatively, if you are using Qualtrics's email distribution to send your survey to a contact list, you can use the Recipient Email embedded data field; or, if you are using an authentication block to require KSU login to access a form, you can record the authenticated user's email address to an embedded data variable. Piped Text is then used to insert the email address from the question response or embedded data.

When to use: You want respondents to be emailed a copy of their survey responses, and your survey either includes a question asking their email address, or your survey project is configured in a way that you have the respondent's email address through another embedded data variable (such as the Recipient Email variable if using email distribution to a contact list, or an authenticated user's email if using an Authentication Block to require KSU login on a survey.

Directions

Step 1: Collect respondent email address on the survey

1. On your survey, create a Text Entry question that will collects the user’s email address.
2. In the "Edit question" sidebar menu:
   1. Make sure that Text Type is set to Single Line.

   2. Turn on the option Add Validation; then in the dropdown box that appears, choose Content Type. Under Content Type, click Email Address. (This will check that the text entered in the box matches the pattern of a valid email address.)

      

      If you are using Text Entry "Form" question type (which has multiple text boxes in a single question), click the link "Click here to edit form fields", which appears below the last text box.

      

      This will allow you to set the validation type for each box individually. Set the validation type for any boxes that will contain email addresses to Valid Email Address. When finished, click "Back to preview mode" to save your changes.

      

Step 2: Create a workflow and declare when the task should run

Now that we are collecting the email address of the intended recipient, we can set up the workflow.

To set up a workflow, we first must tell Qualtrics when to carry out a specific task. In this scenario, we want the task to be carried out every time a new survey response is received.

1. Navigate to the Workflows tab.

2. Click Create a workflow > Started when an event is received.

   

3. In the "Select an extension that matches what you want to do" window, click Survey response.
4. In the "Survey response" window, choose what types of new survey responses will initiate the email:
   1. Newly created responses (enabled by default): Keep enabled if you want new, finished responses to send an email confirmation.
   2. Responses updated via the Qualtrics API: Enable this setting if you want edited responses to re-trigger the email confirmation. This may mean that some respondents may receive more than one email confirmation.
   3. Include imported responses: Enable this setting if you will be uploading responses into your Qualtrics survey database, and you want uploaded responses to receive the email confirmation the same way the person would've if they'd filled out the survey online. (This setting may be useful if you have collected offline responses, or have performed manual data entry of paper responses in a spreadsheet to be uploaded to Qualtrics.)
   4. Include incomplete responses: Enable this setting if you want respondents who started but did not complete the survey to receive a confirmation email. The person will have needed to complete the portion of the survey that collects their email address.
   5. For surveys with translations: If your survey has been set up with one or more translations, you can "swap out" which translation is used in the body of the email message.

5. Click Finish.

Step 3: Define the task that will be carried out when the response is received

Now that we've told Qualtrics when to run the task, we need to tell it what task to perform.

1. Click the "plus" button under the new action, then click Add a task.

   

   1. If you want to add additional conditions to limit when the email confirmation is sent (e.g. only send an email if a particular question was answered "yes"): click Add a condition.
   2. If you do not want to add additional constraints: Click the plus button, then click Add a task.

2. Click Email. (Due to the number of task options available, you may wish to use the search box to search for email.)

   

Step 4: Compose the confirmation email

At this stage, we can compose the email confirmation that the respondent will receive. If you have previously used the older Email Trigger feature, this screen will feel familiar, but with several notable enhancements.

1. In the "To" field (i.e. the recipient), it is possible to add piped text strings directly to the box. Click the Piped Text icon :

   

   Mouseover the “Survey Question” menu item, then find the question on your survey that collects the email address. Mouse over that question, and click on the menu item that is below Question Text. (The actual text in the menu will match the prompt for the email question item.) Then in the dropdown menu that appears, choose the source of the respondent's email address. If you have collected the respondent's email address on the survey question, look in the Survey Question section.

   

   After adding the piped text, the To field should look similar to the following:

   

2. When: You can schedule emails to be sent immediately upon survey completion, or delay the delivery until a specific time interval after the response was received. (For individuals conducting longitudinal or panel studies with rolling recruitment, this is an excellent option for scheduling follow-up invitations relative to a respondent's initial response.)

   

3. Response reports are no longer included by default.

   

4. Response reports can be included without including the respondent information (such as IP address). If the "Include Recipient Data" setting is enabled, the report will include the Response ID, the IP address, and the end date associated with the response.
5. You can choose whether to include embedded data variables in the response report.
6. Click Save when finished.

Workflows take effect immediately: unlike other modifications to a survey, you do not need to re-publish the survey after adding a workflow in order for it to take effect. Workflows can be enabled or disabled at any time using the on/off switch on the Workflows screen.

An additional benefit of workflows is the Run history, which is a record of all the times the workflow has been carried out. This is extremely helpful for troubleshooting.