Best practices for sending distributions to individuals

rscharer
You can generate personal links for each contact in the list. It doesn't have to be a list entirely always. It's just that contact needs to be on a list.Hence, target is a contact and not list. In that manner all your 10k+ contact can be in one list. Not sure where you're facing error, also why you're not using qualtrics mailer to distribute survey. You can automate this entirely via Automation.
Hope it helps!

Thanks for the quick response, Deepak! We're choosing (for the moment) to use our CRM platform to distribute the emails so that we can keep our client communications in a single place.
I'm a little confused by your recommendation, though. As I understand it, the 'create distribution' API endpoint (https://api.qualtrics.com/573e3f0a94888-create-distribution) will generate distribution links for all members of the member list specified by mailingListId. Then I would have to call the "Retrieve Generated Links" endpoint (https://api.qualtrics.com/573e3f0a94888-create-distribution#retrieve-generated-links) which would return 10k paginated responses. If my intent is just to send a single link to a single recipient, I'd have to search through those 10k links to find the right one and dispatch it. That seems wasteful both for Qualtrics and for my code.
I might be completely misunderstanding your point, though — if there's a way to use the API to generate a single Personal Link please let me know!
Thanks,
Ryan

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54189#Comment_54189Your approach is correct just include contact id below the mailing list id and that should work to generate a personal link for single contact. You can get this by exporting your contact list or via metadata.
 "recipients": {
    "mailingListId": "",
    "contactId": ""
  }
Hope it helps!

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54190#Comment_54190
Does that structure go with the /distribution POST? I feel like I'm missing something important :) When I try this:
{
"surveyId": "SV_czFBNXiZB2vi7C6",
"linkType": "Individual",
"description": "test distribution 2",
"action": "CreateDistribution",
"expirationDate": "2023-09-13 00:00:00",
"recipients": {
"mailingListId": "CG_ePReZRid7oeJpe1",
"contactId": "CID_2UYO19krrLNl1dI"
}
}
I get the error: "errorMessage": "Unexpected json key provided: recipients",

When I try this:
{
"surveyId": "SV_czFBNXiZB2vi7C6",
"linkType": "Individual",
"description": "test distribution",
"action": "CreateDistribution",
"expirationDate": "2023-09-13 00:00:00",
"mailingListId": "CG_ePReZRid7oeJpe1",
"contactId": "CID_2UYO19krrLNl1dI"
}
I get the error: "Issue with parameter: contactId, please fix and try again. Reason: Creating distribution for single contact is not supported yet.",

What am I missing? 😅

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54191#Comment_54191I think the JSON you're using to create distribution is completely different it is something like this
{
  "message": {
    "libraryId": "",
    "messageId": ""
  },
   "recipients": {
    "mailingListId": "",
    "contactId": ""
  },
  "header": {
    "fromEmail": "",
    "replyToEmail": "",
    "fromName": "",
    "subject": ""
  },
  "surveyLink": {
    "surveyId": "",
    "expirationDate": "",
    "type": "Individual"
  },
  "sendDate": ""
}
Hope it helps!

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/54192#Comment_54192That's the JSON structure you use when you want the distribution emailed, not the one that you use when you just generate links. It's the first use case here: https://api.qualtrics.com/573e3f0a94888-create-distribution as opposed to the second.

rscharer
Yes, my bad!
I misunderstood it. It's just for the mailing list.
One other approach could be to create a contact in the mailing list with this API. Send everyone an anonymous link of the survey. Post which you need to manipulate the survey flow a bit, you can include an authenticator at the start and allow them to fill survey just once. Experience would be the same, they just need to get authenticated via any unique contact field.
Hope it helps!

Thanks, I'll take that under consideration — sounds like there is no perfect option yet but there are a few not-quite-perfect ones to choose from.