Delivering Surveys using Sprig Panels

Recruit new respondents using Sprig’s built-in panel solution. Build a Survey, specify the characteristics of the audience you need to reach, understand costs immediately, launch and collect high-quality responses quickly.

Overview

Sprig Panels let you recruit verified, screened participants from a curated research panel and deliver your survey directly to them. This is useful when you want to:

• Reach people outside your existing user base
• Test concepts or ideas with a fresh audience
• Understand brand perception from non-customers
• Avoid over-surveying your own users

Note: Sprig Panels is available to Enterprise plans on Surveys (link surveys) only. If your organization does not have Panels enabled, reach out to your dedicated Customer Success team or [e-mail] for more information on how to enable it.

Accessing Panels

Panels require credits, which are purchased annually through your Sprig Sales or Customer Success contact. Once you’ve purchased credits you’ll be able to access the Panels functionality inside Surveys. If you need more credits during the year you can always purchase more. 

Creating a Panel

Panels are created within a Survey (i.e. link survey, previously known as a Long-Form survey). You can add a panel to a new or existing survey.

To create a panel:

1. Open the survey

   Navigate to a new or existing Survey and click Edit.

2. Go to the Audience tab

   Open the Audience tab.

3. Turn on Sprig Panel

   Toggle Sprig Panel on. Note: Sprig Panel and Email distribution cannot both be active on the same survey at this time.

4. Open the Panels tab

   A Panels tab will appear in the survey builder. Click Continue to Panels at the bottom of the Audience tab to open it.

5. Create the panel

   Click Create New Panel and fill in the required fields.

6. Save or continue

   Save as a draft and return later, or continue to configure recruitment criteria.

Draft panels launch automatically when you launch the survey. 

Note: Surveys with a panel must include a Consent / Legal question. Sprig won’t launch the survey without one, to ensure proper participant consent is in place before collecting responses. The question should always be marked Required.

Writing Your Consent Question

The Consent / Legal question should give participants enough information to decide whether to take part. It should be the first question in the survey and always be marked Required.

What your consent copy should include

Your consent copy should tell participants:

• What data you’re collecting. Call out any sensitive personal data by name, such as health information, racial or ethnic origin, or religious or political beliefs.
• What you’ll use the data for.
• Where the data is stored and how long you’ll keep it.
• How you’ll keep their identity anonymous or their answers confidential.
• Whether anonymized data might be shared with other researchers or published later.
• How they can withdraw consent and ask for their data to be deleted.
• The legal basis or framework (for example, GDPR) that governs how the data is processed and stored.

Asking for consent

After the information above, ask participants to confirm that they have read and understood it and that they agree to take part. Participants give consent by selecting the checkbox and submitting the question.

If a participant doesn’t consent

Participants who don’t consent shouldn’t see the rest of the survey. When the Consent / Legal question is marked Required, participants can’t continue without agreeing to it.

Don’t use is skipped skip logic on an optional Consent / Legal question to handle participants who don’t consent. A participant who skips the question and reaches the end of the survey is recorded as a completed response and is paid.

This applies to any skip logic that ends the survey early. Participants who reach the end of the survey are paid in full. Only quotas can screen a participant out.

Required Panel Information

When creating a panel, you’ll provide:

• Panel Name (Public): visible to participants, so make it clear and descriptive.
• Panel Description (Public): shown to participants before they decide to take part. This description can be up to 5,000 characters.
• Number of participants: the total number of completed responses you need.
• Survey length: your estimated completion time in minutes. This helps participants decide if they want to participate and is used in cost calculations for incentives.
• Cost per completed Survey: Sprig calculates this for you based on your number of participants and survey length. 
• Screen-out slots: the number of participants who can be screened out by your quotas. This is only required if the survey has quotas enabled when it’s launched. See Adding Quotas and Screener Questions.

Note: You can run multiple panels on a single survey to, for example, target different audience segments.

Defining Recruitment Criteria

After filling in the basic panel info, you can define who you want to recruit by adding criteria. There are over 300 available filters, and many categories including:

• Location
• Gender
• Age
• Employment Status
• Industry
• Job Title
• Company Size
• Household Income
• Education

As you make selections and save, Sprig shows you a live count of how many participants match your criteria and updates the estimated total cost.

Adding Quotas and Screener Questions

If you need more precise targeting than the filters provide, you can add screener questions directly in the survey by using Sprig’s built-in quota criteria. Screener questions act as in-survey filters, and participants who don’t qualify are “screened out” and not shown the full survey.

When using screeners:

• Always set your panel recruitment criteria first. Criteria determine who sees the study; screeners further qualify within that pool.
  • Screener questions in the survey will not limit who the survey is shown to. Only recruitment criteria limits who can see a survey in order to decide to take it.
• Set Screen-out slots to define how many screened-out participants are allowed. This field CAN be increased after the panel and survey are launched. If you end up not having many people screen out you will get the credits back after the panel completes or is canceled and its last responses are settled, up to about 5 days after the last response.
• Make sure your quotas don’t conflict with the panel filter criteria you’ve already set.
• Place screener questions directly after the Consent / Legal question.
• Screened-out participants receive a nominal payment, not the full incentive.

People who screen out will count towards the overall number of responses in a survey but they won’t count towards the number of participants you set for the panel. Only respondents who complete the survey will count towards that number.

For example, if you want to survey doctors who own goats, the recruitment criteria can find doctors, and a quota can check whether they own a goat. Every doctor who matches the criteria can start the survey, and many of them won’t own a goat, so you’ll need more screen-out slots.

Excluding Participants

Recruitment criteria can only include people. To exclude a group, use a quota. For example, to keep doctors out of a survey, add the screener question “Are you a doctor?” and set the quota so only participants who answer No continue.

Choosing a Number of Screen-out Slots

How many screen-out slots you need depends on how much of your recruited audience you expect to match your quotas. Screen-out slots are inexpensive, so if you’re not sure, start with a high number, such as the same as your number of participants (or half that for a large panel). Monitor the panel after launch and increase the slots if needed. Credits for unused slots are returned after the panel completes or is canceled and its last responses are settled, up to about 5 days after the last response.

Setting Up Your Survey for a Panel

Response Settings

In the survey’s Audience tab, set the Response Settings to Ongoing. The panel stops recruiting once it reaches its number of participants, and the survey completes on its own when its last panel finishes. Screened-out and incomplete responses count towards the survey’s total responses but not towards the panel’s number of participants.

When Sprig Panel is turned on, the Retake survey settings are set to One response per respondent and can’t be changed. Each panel participant can only submit one response.

Question Order

We recommend ordering panel survey questions as follows:

1. Consent / Legal question (marked Required)
2. Screener questions used by your quotas
3. Your main survey questions
4. Demographic questions, if you need them

Collecting Demographic Data

Panel recruitment criteria aren’t saved with responses. To include demographic data in your analysis, add demographic questions to the end of the survey. These don’t need to be screener questions, since participants already matched the recruitment criteria before starting the survey.

Participant Privacy

Don’t ask panel participants for personally identifiable information such as names, email addresses, or phone numbers. Contacting participants outside of the panel, or asking for a way to do so, is against the panel’s terms of participation.

Launching a Panel

1. Save the panel

   Save your panel configuration.

2. Test the survey

   Preview and test the survey as you normally would.

3. Launch the survey

   Launch the survey. Any draft panels launch automatically at the same time.

After launch:

• You can increase the number of participants or screen-out slots while the panel is running.
• You can add new panels to a live survey at any time.
• You can pause and resume a panel. Panels also pause automatically if the survey is paused.
• You can cancel a panel at any time if you no longer need it to continue.
• No other edits can be made to a panel after launch. Plan your criteria and configuration carefully before going live.

Note: Insufficient credits: If your team doesn’t have enough credits to launch a panel, the survey will still launch but the panel will not. A warning will appear in the UI with a prompt to contact Sales.

How Participants Experience the Survey

Once launched, your study becomes available to participants who match your recruitment criteria. Participants see the panel name, description, estimated length, and compensation before deciding to take part.

When a participant chooses to take the survey, it opens in a new tab. After completing it, they’re automatically redirected back and their completion is recorded in Sprig, no manual code entry required.

Sprig tracks participant IDs to ensure no one is invited to the same study more than once, even across multiple panels on the same survey.

Reviewing Responses

Responses appear in your survey dashboard as they come in, just like any other survey type.

Response Statuses

Each completed panel response on the Responses tab shows the panel name and one of the following statuses:

Status	What it means
Payment pending	Panel response received; payment has not been processed yet (payment is automatically sent 120 hours, or 5 days, after submission)
Paid	A completed panel response; the participant has been paid
Rejected	User defined setting; response excluded from analysis and participant is NOT paid

A response can also show Excluded from analysis alongside its status. This is a user defined setting that hides the response from the Data tab, analysis, and the study report. The response stays on the Responses tab, and its payment status doesn’t change.

Approving, Rejecting, and Excluding Responses

Participants are paid automatically 120 hours (5 days) after their response comes in. Review and reject any responses within that time.

Use the … menu on a response to take these actions:

• Approve a response: simply by doing nothing. 
• Reject a response: if the participant demonstrably did not complete the survey in good faith, select Reject Response, choose a reason, and write a message of at least 100 characters. Rejection prevents payment to the participant, and the participant is notified. Rejection is only available while the response is Payment pending. If you reject a response by accident, select Reverse Rejection. The participant will then be paid once the 5-day window closes.
  • Rejection is a serious action. Only use it when a respondent has clearly violated the terms of participation. There is a limit to how many responses you can reject per panel.
• Exclude a response from analysis: If you want to remove a response from your analysis without rejecting it, select Exclude from analysis instead. The participant will still be paid, and the response stays on the Responses tab, but it won’t appear in the Data tab, analysis, or the study report. Select Include in analysis to undo this.

Note: Panel responses cannot be deleted.

Tracking Panel Progress

Monitor panel performance from the Response tab of your survey. In the top section you’ll progress against your target number of participants and the number of participants screened-out if the survey includes quotas.

Panel States

State	Description
Draft	Panel configured but survey not yet launched
In-Progress	Panel is live and actively recruiting participants
Paused	Panel is temporarily stopped
Completed	Target number of participants reached
Error	Something went wrong, contact Sprig Support.

Monitoring Credit Usage

Your organization’s overall panel credit balance and usage can be found in Settings > Organization > Usage. The panel section shows:

• Total credits purchased for the year
• Credits used to date
• Estimated credits reserved for open (in-progress) panels

The estimated credit usage for each panel is automatically calculated during Panel build, and deducted from your available balance upon launch so you always have an accurate picture of your remaining credits.

To reclaim credits from a panel you no longer need, complete the panel.