I was recently tasked with setting up a prize draw for an anonymous survey in Qualtrics. The challenge of course was not compromising the anonymity of respondents while still collecting the personal information we required for the prize draw. I found the documentation a bit difficult to follow, so I thought I would write a blog post outlining the process I went through in case it was of help to another researcher.

First, I created two separate surveys:

• An anonymous survey containing all the research questions (remember to set your survey to anonymise responses under ‘Security’). For the purposes of this blog post, I will refer to this as “the main survey”.
• Another survey with the appropriate fields to collect the required personal information. For the purposes of this blog post, I will refer to this as “the prize draw survey”.

For the main survey, I needed to ask survey participants if they would like to enter the prize draw, so I set the final question to be multiple choice (Yes/No) and only allowed one answer:

The next step was creating the prize draw survey. I created a new survey and titled it appropriately.  For the prize draw, you will need to decide what information you need to collect—in this case, we needed to collect first and last names and an email address.

You may want to consider using validation on these fields (especially for the email address), as you’ll want to ensure you can contact the winner(s)!

Within the prize draw survey, I chose ‘Distributions’ and ‘Get a single reusable link’ so I could redirect survey participants to the prize draw. Make sure you copy the link as you will need this later.

Next, I changed the survey flow so participants would be taken to the prize draw if they wished. To do this, I returned to the main survey and chose ‘Survey Flow’.

The final step was to add two branches and conditions for “Yes” and “No” responses.  Both would branch to an End of Survey block, but the End of Survey block for “Yes” would redirect the user to the prize draw, whereas the End of Survey block for “No” would display a nice thank you message.

I added a branch by clicking ‘Add a New Element Here’ under the question block:

I then clicked ‘Customize’ on the End of Survey block for “Yes”, chose ‘Override Survey Options’ and ‘Redirect to a URL’. I pasted the link for the prize draw into this field:

I added another branch and set the condition for if the participant chose “No” and added an End of Survey block. You can customise the thank you message here if you wish.

The final flow looked something like this:

Some final thoughts…

• As with any online survey, test, test again, and then test again!
• Ensure you communicate any possible incentives in the participant information sheet/introductory information.
• If you are going to provide incentives, please ensure this is noted in your ethics application.

This blog post has given you a basic example of setting up a prize draw for an anonymous survey, but if you require more advanced features, view the Qualtrics support topic on this.