There are countless reasons why you might want to protect the identities of your survey respondents. Maybe you’re conducting a blind clinical study or asking for sensitive personal information. Maybe you need an anonymous survey to meet the requirements of an Institutional Review Board for academic research. Or maybe you’re doing a simple customer or employee feedback survey, but you want to make sure that respondents feel comfortable answering honestly, so you can collect the most accurate insights possible.
No matter the reason for keeping responses anonymous, you still need to make sure to attract enough participants. While anonymity and incentives might seem like they don’t go together, using digital rewards allows you to incorporate both — once you understand the two D’s, decoupling and data masking.
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When you use decoupling to incentivize an anonymous survey, it means you separate the personal information needed for reward delivery (namely the participant’s email address) from the survey response itself. This is usually done with a redirect at the end of the survey. The respondent is redirected to a page from the rewards provider to enter their email address. To make sure you’re giving rewards only to your invited participants, BHN Rewards will require the user to submit the same email address where the initial survey invitation was sent.
By masking the information collected from participants in an anonymous survey, you can ensure even more privacy. BHN Rewards’ digital incentives tool allows administrators to mask, or hide, data from any or all users in the account. This is especially important when you have multiple people working on a research project that requires anonymity. You can choose which information to hide, including name, email address, location, and any custom fields.
Incentives can be a large part of your survey budget, so you don’t want to waste any money on responses you can’t use. Under normal circumstances, you can review and approve each recipient before their reward is sent, but when their delivery email has been separated from their survey, how can you know if their response qualifies?
Using an anonymous response identifier, like an ID number, lets you match a survey response to a reward recipient. In BHN Rewards, this identifier is passed from your survey platform as a custom field. Make sure reward approvals are turned on, and then, when you see inadequate responses in your survey results, you can find the corresponding response ID in the BHN Rewards approval queue and reject it.
With approvals on, BHN Rewards also lets you set certain parameters, so you don’t have to review every recipient manually. For instance, if you’re not worried about response quality but are concerned that there may be duplicates coming through, you can set it to automatically approve all reward deliveries unless it’s a duplicate email address.
Want to see how BHN Rewards’ integrations with tools like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey make it easy to set up and launch an anonymous survey? Request a demo today!
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
