Send Mailings

You have a list of email addresses and would like to invite the corresponding persons to your survey? In this case, the mailing function of SoSci Survey will help. You will find this function in the menu on the left under Invitation Mailings. How exactly the dispatch with SoSci Survey works is explained in the manual Sending Mailings with SoSci Survey.

The emails do not have to be sent with SoSci Survey. How to proceed in this case is explained in the manual External Dispatch of Mailings.

Important: Regardless of which dispatch method you choose, always observe the data protection laws and also contact your data protection officer, as email addresses count as personal data (Personal Data).

Tip: First test the mail dispatch and the access to the questionnaire with your own email address and/or those of your colleagues. If you have already imported email addresses into SoSci Survey, you can add your own address to a separate subgroup and send the test mails to this group only.

As mentioned above, mailings can be sent either with SoSci Survey or externally.

Sending invitation links by means of an external program offers the following advantages:

• The email addresses or contact data do not have to be imported into SoSci Survey, which may save you the DPA (of course, SoSci Survey does not pass on the addresses to third parties or use them otherwise)
• Full control over the sender name and email address.
• No reference to SoSci Survey at the end of each email.

Sending by means of SoSci Survey offers the following advantages:

• No external program is required.
• SoSci Survey automatically creates the personalized link during dispatch.
• SoSci Survey can record the participation status for each address entry (except in the privacy mode “anonymous”).
  • SoSci Survey can ensure that the data is collected pseudonymously.
  • SoSci Survey can send reminder mails specifically to addressees who have not yet responded.
• The mailings can be sent automatically at a specified point in time.
  • A time-randomized dispatch is possible as well.
  • For MESM studies, sending text messages (SMS) is also possible (subject to a charge).
• In multi-wave surveys, SoSci Survey can automatically assign the same pseudonym to related cases in the dataset (except in the privacy modes “anonymous” or “make anonymous when finished”)

The procedure differs for the two variants and is explained in the corresponding manuals:

• Sending Mailings with SoSci Survey
• External Dispatch of Mailings

If you would like to refer to a respondent's earlier answers in a multi-wave survey, it makes sense to interrupt the survey and continue it later (i.e., in the second survey wave). This can also be useful if largely different variables are collected in the waves of a multi-wave survey (instead of the same questionnaire every time) and the dataset shall only contain one data row per case. For this to work, however, the respondent must not reach the last page of the questionnaire in the first wave.

To achieve this, an interruption page has to be built into the questionnaire – at the point where the survey shall be interrupted for the first time. To do so, add an element PHP code to a page (which ideally does not show a question, but only a friendly farewell from the first part) and in it the commands buttonHide() and option('resume', true).

To start the second survey wave, remove this interruption page. Let the respondents know that they shall open the link again. If necessary, you can also send them the link once more. The questionnaire then continues with the next page. The back button (if enabled) works as well – if this is not desired, it can be disabled on the first page of the second part by means of option('backbutton', false).