How to Provide an Anonymous Connection Between Two Surveys (WITHOUT an email list!)
Please help. We need to do the following:
Provide an anonymous survey URL to an online group (no email lists are available).
Have an “employee” complete the Employee Survey (survey #1) anonymously.
At the completion of the Employee Survey, have Qualtrics generate a URL to the Manager Survey (survey #2) that should be linked to the same individual in the Employee Survey. We do NOT want to use an email address or IP address to link surveys because they are not anonymous.
The “employee” now can provide the linked/connected URL to their “manager” and have the “manager” take the linked/connected Manager Survey.
A BETTER ALTERNATIVE? Another option could be to do this as two parts to the same survey, where the employee starts the Employee Portion, then pauses the survey after they finish their part, getting some type of URL that will allow them to email that to their Manager to “finish” the survey (i.e., the Manager part). Would this work instead? If so, how?
FINALLY: We prefer to NOT use only a generated identifier code to link the two surveys because it means that the “manager” would need both the URL and the code. If it could all be in the URL, that is best. If not, how can we do it with the URL and the code?
Many thanks in advance for any assistance. I have scoured the posts and have not found an answer to this dilemma.
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My 2 cents
Option 1:
Could you set up an embedded field creating a random number in Survey #1.
And then at the end of survey #1 add this to the link [link]?UID=${e://Field/rangen} to send to manager and capture it in Survey #2 embedded field UID. You could link back the manager survey response to the employee survey as needed using this code and it would mean nothing to the manager, remaining anonymous (assuming they have not been invited to collaborate and cannot access the employee survey)
Option2:
Alternatively if you want it all in the one survey add an embedded flag “Partial”. Have the employee run through their bit arriving on a text only question (No forward button) presenting the link you want them to email their manager on the page with instructions to send it on. The link would need to have the embedded field added to it tsurvey link]?Partial=Yes and use the embedded field in branch logic so that it skips the employee questions (show if Partial= Empty) through to the manager questions (Show if Partial=Yes). Back button would need to be off altogether, or for that manager landing page but there’s plenty of examples of that in the community. Step further would be to have the employee enter their managers email address and then having an email direct to them with the URL.
Cheers P
Thank you for your feedback and advice on this!
I’ll start working right now to see if I can implement this as you suggested.
And in answer to one of your assumptions, you are correct that the managers should not be able to access the employee responses. (The employees will share the URL with the managers though.)
PhilMC,
Regarding Option 2 (which we’d prefer), we understand about adding ?Partial=Yes to the survey URL, but don’t we need to create a unique survey URL for each respondent so that the manager comes back to the correct survey? We don’t have access to an email list and will be sharing only the generic survey URL to all the employees.
Thanks.
You’re absolutely correct. I’ll have to trial this at some point myself. You can add a randomly generated number & add that to URL but it will result in the employee being an “”in progress” case and the manager being the complete due to the anon link not recognizing it as the same case. Not entirely impossible to marry up via a vlookup but not A1. Alternatively, you move the link to email manager to a custom end page of the Employee survey so that you get a ‘complete’ employee record in the data. If both parts are written as one survey then you wold need to create the dataset for one case using rangen and then upload that as one set.
It’s not as neat as you’ll want it but I cannot see a way of getting both responses in the one case using the anon links as they will always see every entry as ‘new’.
