Automated Survey Invitations (ASI) can be used to send an invitation as well as reminders for a respondent to complete a survey within an active record.
Jump to:
- Enable Surveys in the Project
- Determine Designated Email Field(s)
- Configure Automated Survey Invitations
- Warnings
Enable Surveys in the Project
To use ASIs, you must have surveys enabled in your project. To enable surveys in your project, go to the Project Setup page of your project.
Click the "Enable" button beside "Use surveys in this project?".
Please note that surveys cannot be enabled by someone on the project after you have moved into production. If you would like surveys enabled after moving into production, create a ticket notifying our REDCap Administrators that you need assistance.
Determine Designated Email Field(s)
ASIs also require a designated email field, either project-level or survey-level.
Enabling a Project-Level Email Field
This method will suit your project if you anticipate all records to collect a single email address where all ASIs will be routed to. To enable a project-level email field, navigate to Project Setup.
Under "Enable optional modules and customizations", select "Enable" beside "Designate an email field for communications (including survey invitations and alerts)"
This email address will also be connected to/appear for the participant on the Participant List.
DO NOT enable this feature if you are attempting to collect data anonymously by using the Participant List.
Enabling a Survey-Level Email Field
This option may be more preferable if you anticipate collecting multiple email address fields that correspond to different individuals with data collected in a single record. For example, collecting data from two partners or a parent and child.
To enable this, navigate to the Designer.
From the Designer, locate the survey which will need ASI enabled. Select "Survey settings".
Find the setting titled, "Survey-specific email invitation field". Select the email address that will be the survey-level designated email field for this survey.
You will need to make a selection for each survey which will need Automated Survey Invitations enabled.
Configure Automated Survey Invitations
When you have designated your email field as desired, navigate to the Designer.
Locate the survey which will need ASI enabled. Select "Automated Survey Invitations". If your project is longitudinal, then you will need to configure ASI settings for each event.
First, before you will be able to save your ASI settings, you must select whether the ASI you are configuring will be Active or Not Active.
Step 1: Compose message
Select an email address from the dropdown list in the "Email From:" line. This will be a list of email addresses associated with the users in your REDCap project. You can add secondary and tertiary email addresses to your REDCap profile, which will also appear in this list. This might be useful if you have a generic study email address where you would like to receive responses. If you don't know where to edit your account profile, see How to Edit REDCap Profile.
Finally, configure the subject and body of the email you would like to send to the recipient. We encourage you to keep [survey-link] and [survey-url] in the body of your email, as this will generate a unique link for your participant to access the survey.
Step 2: Conditions
You can select to trigger this survey invitation when a specified survey is completed, when specified logic becomes true, or both. Use the checkboxes to indicate the options you'd like to include.
Checking the "Ensure logic is still true before sending invitation?" box will ask the system to check whether the logic you have specified is still true for every record before sending the notification, just in case something in their data has changed since the notification was first scheduled.
Step 3: When to send invitations AFTER conditions are met
You can set the invitation to send immediately after the logic from Step 1 has been met, after a specified period at a specific time of day, after a specific period of time, or at an exact date and time.
Then, you can set whether to send the notification more than once. If you'd like it to send more than once, you can set it to send based on interactions with the form/survey set in Step 1 or a set number of times over some period.
You can also select whether to enable reminders. If you enable reminders, this section of settings will expand.
In these settings, set the frequency of invitation reminders, then set how many reminders will be sent (from 1-5).
Warnings
If you must modify an existing invitation, please re-evaluate your invitations. To re-evaluate your invitations, return to the Designer page and locate the "Auto Invitations options".
Select "Re-evaluate Automated Survey Invitations".
You will be met with the following pop-up:
At the bottom of the pop-up, you will see a list of your surveys that have ASIs enabled. If you select to "Re-evaluate selected surveys", the system will re-evaluate the logic for the invitations against each record to cancel or reschedule invitations as necessary.
You will also have an "Enable Test Run?" option. If you turn on this option, you can choose to re-evaluate your selected surveys without the system taking official action. After completing a test run, you will receive confirmation that no changes were made, along with a csv file of records that would have been affected.
IMPORTANT NOTE: When modifying invitations, please pay close attention to this language from the developers that can be found in the "Re-evaluate conditions for Auto Invitations" pop-up above:
"Re-evaluating an ASI will *NOT* modify already-scheduled invitations - i.e., it will not modify their invitation text, recipient/sender addresses, or the date/time that the invitation is scheduled to be sent *if* the invitation has already been scheduled. When re-evaluating an ASI, only changes to Step 2 of the ASI setup process will be considered (and not changes to Step 3) when determining if an invitation should be scheduled or if an already-scheduled invitation should be removed/unscheduled."
If a record's ASI is already scheduled, and you attempt to reschedule it by changing Step 3 of the ASI configuration, it will be unsuccessful in rescheduling that ASI invitation.
Additionally, once the initial ASI invitation has been sent to a recipient, it cannot be retriggered. If an original ASI invitation has already sent, attempts to delete and reschedule reminders will not be successful. Reminders rely entirely on the original invitation date and cannot be scheduled on their own, so they cannot be modified, and once they are deleted, they will not be retriggered for that invitation.