Pre-populate your Projects

Why ask for answers you already know? When surveying, you may already have relevant data from your contacts. You can include this background information in your reports data without even having to ask the questions. Data pre-population improves quality of data and reports and surveys shorter and more engaging for participants.

Navigate to

• Pre-Populated Email Invitations
• Pre-Populated Survey Passwords
• Good to Know

Data population can be used with Single-Use or Multi-Use Link email invitations or Single-Use Survey Passwords.

To send email invitations for a project that includes Pre-Population, follow these steps:

1. Create a new project or edit an existing one.
2. First, apply pre-population to your questions. Learn more about how to set up your questions for Pre-Population.

   If you do not apply Pre-Population within Design, you will not see Pre-Population options within Distribute

3. When you’re ready to publish, click on Distribute from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
4. In the Email column, select Single-Use Link or Multi-Use Link and click Continue.
5. Select the email template you want to use for your email invitations.
6. For Source of Email Addresses, choose one of the following options:
   
   • Type Manually
     1. Under Additional Publishing Options, choose Pre-Populate Questions. This option will be pre-selected if your survey already contains a Pre-Populated question. Click on Continue to proceed.
     2. Enter the data manually for the questions to be Pre-Populated. Enter data for each individual by selecting the option from the dropdown or by typing in the textbox.
        
     3. Click on Continue
   • From a File
     1. Under Additional Publishing Options, choose Pre-Populate Questions. This option will be pre-selected if your survey already contains a pre-populated question. Click on Continue to proceed.
     2. Map the question to the answer column in your file. The system will first auto-map all the questions with the columns in order.
        
     3. As needed, you can reset the auto-mapping by clicking on Reset and manually map the columns in the file to questions.
     4. Click on Continue.
   • From a List
     1. Under Additional Publishing Options, choose Pre-Populate Questions. This option will be pre-selected if your survey already contains a pre-populated question. Click on Continue to proceed.
     2. Map the question to the answer column in your Contact List. The system will first auto-map all the questions with the columns in order.

        When a survey with Pre-Population is distributed through a List, Pre-Population settings are saved for future use of the same survey and List.

     3. As needed, you can reset the auto-mapping by clicking on Reset and manually map the columns in the file to questions.
     4. Click on Continue.
7. If fields in your file or Contact List contain mismatches or blanks, the system will redirect you to a data review step.
   

   To pre-fill single-select questions, content in the fields you upload must exactly match answer options provided in the survey.

   1. You’ll see values that are either a mismatch or blank fields. Download all the blanks and mismatches to review.
   2. Based on your source type, you can either go back and re-upload the reviewed file or go to Contact Lists to change values.
   3. As appropriate, you may choose to continue and publish with any blanks and/or mismatched data.

To generate Single-Use Passwords for a project with Pre-Population, follow these steps:

1. Create a new project or edit an existing one.
2. First, apply pre-population to your questions. Learn more about how to set up your questions for Pre-Population.

   If you do not apply Pre-Population within Design, you will not see Pre-Population options within Distribute

3. Click on Distribute from the menu bar.
4. In the Offline/SMS column on the right, select Survey Passwords and click Continue.
5. Select Single-Use Passwords.

   Pre-Population is not available for Multi-Use Passwords.

6. Choose to use an existing Contact List or upload a file of custom passwords.

   You cannot pre-populate for randomly generated passwords.

7. If you have questions set for Pre-Population, Pre-Populate Questions will be selected.
8. Map the question to the answer column in your Contact List. The system will first auto-map all the questions with the columns in order.
9. As needed, you can reset the auto-mapping by clicking on Reset and manually map the columns in the file to questions.
10. Click on Continue.
11. If fields in your file or Contact List contain mismatches or blanks, the system will redirect you to a data review step.

    To pre-fill single-select questions, content in the fields you upload must exactly match answer options provided in the survey.

    1. You’ll see values that are either a mismatch or blank fields. Download all the blanks and mismatches to review.
    2. Based on your source type, you can either go back and re-upload the reviewed file or go to Contact Lists to change values.
    3. As appropriate, you may choose to continue and publish with any blanks and/or mismatched data.

Good to Know

To pre-populate Check Box and List Box questions, the relevant field(s) in the Contact List or file used for distribution must include the vertical bar (|) as a separator between answer options. No additional space should be included on either side of the separator.

In this example, the participant who receives an invitation at “userguide@example.com” will have the answer options USA, Germany, and Italy pre-filled.

If you have answer constraints applied within these question types, you’ll need to follow the same constraints while pre-populating these questions. For example, if your question is set to only allow two answer options but your list includes three answers for some participants, these fields will be identified as data mismatches when attempting to distribute.