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Survey protection with anonymous link

  • 22 March 2020
  • 4 replies
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A
Hi all, I have a question regarding my survey protection. Here is the setup.
1- I want to distribute a survey through a third party: A university will send an email to its students. In that email. students will find an anonymous link to my survey.
2- It is important that only the students who receive this email complete the survey. In other words, I want to avoid students forwarding the email to their friends (completing the survey has some financial compensation, so they may have incentives to do so).
3- To avoid this, I wonder whether there is any way of tracking sender of the email from which the student is taking the survey. If I would do this, I could flag those students who are completing the survey from an email that was sent by some non-official account.
I fear this option is not possible, but there may still be a way to improve protection, albeit no perfectly.

The only thing that I did so far is to select "Prevent Ballot Box Stuffing", but this does not solve my problem.
I have been reading the HTTP verification option, but I cannot see the way it could improve my setting.

Any suggestion?

Thank you!
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Best answer by TomG 22 March 2020, 16:18

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TomG
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Userlevel 7
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If the University has the capability to do a mail merge, you could provide a list of personal links that they send out. You would create a generic contact list with unique external data reference ids, then create personal links for that list and provide it to the the University.
A
Sorry Tom, but I am not sure I understand your suggestion well.
Just to be clear, the survey is supposed to serve to recruit students. The university will forward my email to all their students of a particular year (the objective is to reach many students -thousands- in a way that involves very little effort for the university -just to forward an email to their student contact of a given year-).

The university cannot provide me with any list, because of data protection issues. Therefore, in this recruitment survey, I ask students their contact information, so that I can reach them later, for new surveys, using a personal survey link and have a more controlled environment.

Maybe your suggestion still applies, but I don't understand it well.
TomG
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +27
> @Ali5 said:
> Sorry Tom, but I am not sure I understand your suggestion well.
> Just to be clear, the survey is supposed to serve to recruit students. The university will forward my email to all their students of a particular year (the objective is to reach many students -thousands- in a way that involves very little effort for the university -just to forward an email to their student contact of a given year-).
>
> The university cannot provide me with any list, because of data protection issues. Therefore, in this recruitment survey, I ask students their contact information, so that I can reach them later, for new surveys, using a personal survey link and have a more controlled environment.
>
> Maybe your suggestion still applies, but I don't understand it well.

Say the University has 10,000 students they are going to send the email to. You create a contact list with 10,000 unique external data reference ids. There is no personally identifiable info in the list, it just has unique ids. Set your survey to invite only. You then go to distribute survey and create personal links for the contact list. You then send that list of links to the University and they use it to do a mail merge (send one of the links to each of the target students).

Of course, it depends on if the University has the ability and willingness to do a mail merge distribution.
A
Thank you for explaining it TomG! Now I understood it and I think it is a valid approach for my project. Thank you! !

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