For customers with the ‘Contacts upload’ feature, once your Account Admin has uploaded contacts to ThoughtExchange, you will have two options for determining which of your contacts can participate in your engagement. 

The first option is via email; send an email containing a 'Unique invitation link' to each of your contacts to participate in your engagement.

The second option is ‘Code access’; limit participation to those who enter a pre-approved code (such as their employee number or student ID).

Learn more about:

• Unique Links 
• Code Authenticated Access

For either of these options, we provide the ability to build a segment by using the filter criteria to choose who you want to invite.

• E.g. I want to send my engagement [blank] to [departments= marketing, sales] who have [start date >= 2021-01-01]

*Access to the ‘contacts upload’ feature is restricted to account admins. Additionally, not all accounts have access to the Contacts Upload feature, please contact your ThoughtExchange rep for more details.

Unique Links

When you invite participants into your engagement via the email option in the Participants step of your draft engagement, each participant will receive a unique link by which to participate. When activated, only these links can be used to access that particular engagement. This ensures that invitees cannot participate in surveys more than once (and will not be counted more than once if they switch devices), and provides a measure of control for leaders regarding who is participating. It also makes it easier for participants to pick up where they left off if participating across multiple sessions. 

These links do not completely prevent participants from sharing access to an engagement with individuals who are not on a predetermined list of participants, but it means that people using the same link can only participate in the engagement once between them.

Note: Individualized links are not compatible with domain restriction or choosing to make an engagement with ‘mandatory sign up/login to a ThoughtExchange account’ enabled.  This is because invitees are not required to log in to any account; rather they must click the individual link that has been emailed to them.

Invite Contacts to an engagement

1. In Step 4 (Participants) of your draft engagement, toggle the “Participants” option to ON.
2. Select the channel through which you would like to send invitations (For unique links, select ‘email’)
3. Manually enter email addresses OR Add filter criteria: to segment your desired contact grouping. The criteria are sourced from the ‘optional’ fields that are uploaded from the “Contact upload” page.

• Add up to 10 segment criteria
  • Text: allows for equal to (picklist)
  • Date: allows for less than, less than or equal to, equal to, greater than, greater than or equal to (date picker)
  • Number: allows for less than, less than or equal to, equal to, greater than, greater than or equal to (input field)
• When you’re happy with the segment that you’ve constructed click “Next”
  
  
  
  
   

4. Customize your email: you can customize the email body and subject with plain text. We do provide some default copy that contains the:

• Subject: [leader name]
• Message: [leader name] and [exchange question]

Once you’re satisfied with your messaging click “Next”

5. Preview: this is the last step before sending your email invites to participate in the engagement. You can scroll through the details of the send out to preview all the details you’ve created.
6. Invite: when you click the invite button an email message will be sent to all your specified contacts. This can take some time depending on how large the segmented group is (few minutes to few hours). 

• You can check the status of your send by going to the “Email log” under Room settings > Email log
  

Roles: Customer admin, Room Admin, Coach Manage, Coach View, and leader can access the Send to imported contacts invite option and send invites.

Resending an Invitation 

Occasionally an invitee may reach out because they can’t locate their unique link.  You can resend a link by clicking “Invite” in the three dots menu on the engagement card in your Engagements list view. 

This will open the “Invite participants” dialog box, where you can manually enter the email address of the invitee who has misplaced their link.  

If the email address was in the original group of invitees, they will receive the same unique link from the first email send.  If the email address you enter is brand new, they will receive their own unique link.

Note: you can choose to send emails using ‘Participant invite criteria’ if you wish to send via the uploaded list of contacts.

Code Authenticated Access

If you wish to restrict participation to a select group of invitees without using email invitations, code-authenticated access ensures only those who provide their approved access code can participate.

When your Account Admin uploads the list of contacts, it must include a unique code (that each individual knows but keeps private) such as their employee number or student ID associated with each contact.

Once the contacts list is imported, the Account Admin will need to map each column to a data label.  In the example above, they would map “Employee ID” to the label “Access code”

Note: Code access is not compatible with domain restriction or choosing to make an engagement with ‘mandatory sign up/login to a ThoughtExchange account’ enabled.  This is because invitees are not required to log in to any account; rather they must enter their individual code in order to gain access to the engagement.

Invite participation using code authenticated access

1. In Step 4 of your draft engagement (Participants), toggle the ‘Participants’ option to ON
2. Select ‘Code access’ 
3. Select the criteria to determine which contacts will be granted access to this particular engagement

4. Click “Save & Next” once you have determined your ‘participant invite criteria’
5. In Step 5 (Summary), when you are ready to open your engagement up for participation, click “Launch”
6. Clicking “Launch” will take you to the Engagements list.  Find your engagement at the top of the list and click the 3 dots menu

7. Find and click “Invite” from the list of options 
8. You can either copy the link or the QR code and then it is up to you how you wish to share out your invitation link.  

NOTE: it’s important to indicate to your invitees what their access code will be.  

E.g. “You will be asked to enter an access code, which is your employee number.  If you don’t remember your employee number, contact [name] in HR”

When a user clicks the invitation link, they will be asked to enter their access code.  Users who are unable to enter a valid code (i.e. a code that matches what is contained in the ‘participant invite criteria’ from the uploaded contacts) will not be granted access to participate in your engagement.

Adding individuals to the accepted list for code authenticated access

If you missed some individuals when you first set your criteria for those who could be allowed access to your engagement, you can add them after the fact.

1. Find your engagement from the Engagements list and click the 3 dots menu
2. Find and click “Invite” from the list of options
3. Click on the dropdown option and select “Code access”
4. Select the additional criteria needed to include the target individuals

5. Once you are satisfied with your criteria, click “Add participants”.  You will see a ‘success’ message at the top of the screen

6. Re-open the Invite dialog (click the 3 dots menu again) and select the “Link” option
7. Copy the link (or QR code) and send it to the newly added participants

Filter by imported demographic data 

Nobody likes answering the same question twice. With the ability to filter results by imported demographic data, you can use any of the data fields you uploaded with your list of contacts.

When unique links or code authenticated access are used with the ‘confidential’ engagement privacy setting (learn more about ‘anonymous and confidential engagements’ here), any demographic data imported from the contact upload can be used as a filter in the Survey analysis and Advisor pages of the Results Dashboard.  

Roles: 

• Account admin can import contacts  
• Account admin, Room admin, and leader can access the Send to imported contacts invite option and send invites.

*Managing Multiple Submissions with unique links or code authenticated access: 

Let's say a participant has three children in the same school - and needs to complete the survey 3 times from the same device. 

When setting up your participant access:

• If you choose access codes, consider using the student ID to uniquely identify each child.
• If you choose unique links sent via email, you can use a simple trick to generate multiple unique email addresses for the same person. Add a suffix to the email address, e,g:
  • john.doe@thoughtexchange.com
  • john.doe+1@thoughtexchange.com
  • john.doe+2@thoughtexchange.com

These variations will all deliver to the same email address (the text after the "+" is ignored by most email systems).

With a quick formula in Excel, you can automate this process for multiple entries with minimal effort. You will need to create three rows in the upload sheet—one row for each child. The result? Three unique links will be sent to the same email address, ensuring each submission is treated as distinct.