Request a third party sample from Alida

Need a third party sample to respond to your survey? Use the External Audiences tab to distribute the survey to participants outside of your community.

Prerequisites:

Creating an external audience and submitting the audience details is equivalent to distributing your survey to a third sample immediately. Before you begin, plan your distributions carefully:

  • Survey authoring

    Your survey should have completion, disqualification, and over quota points for different types of participants. Include best practice elements like speed check, trap, and red herring questions. Ensure you test your survey thoroughly before distribution.

    For more information, see Third party sample integration.

  • Credits

    Ensure you have enough credits to purchase the sample you're requesting. As you fill out the details, qualification criteria, and incidence rate, the application will display the estimated cost. To purchase more credits, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

  • Quotas

    The current release of this feature does not support quotas. To work around this, create separate external audience requests for each quota segment.

  • Soft launch vs. full launch

    The current release of this feature does not allow you to delineate soft launches vs. full launches. To work around this, create separate external audience requests: one for 10% of the full sample size you require, and then another request for the remaining 90%.

  • Supported languages

    The current release of this feature only supports en-US third party samples. Do not use this feature if you require a third party sample in another language.

Note:
  • Third party samples are available for modern surveys only. They are not available for classic surveys, recruitment surveys, power surveys, forums, external activities, or video discussions.
  • For any issues with this workflow, please contact Alida Technical Support.
  1. Go to the Surveys app and open a survey.
  2. Click the Distribute tab.
  3. In the left menu, click External Audiences.
  4. Click New Audience.
  5. Type a name for the external audience and click Create.

Click the screenshot below to view a larger version.

  1. Type the Survey Length in Minutes.
  2. Type the Days in the Field value.
  3. Specify the Number of Responses Required.
  4. Optional: Turn the Collects Personally Identifiable Information toggle on or off.
    If your survey asks participants for sensitive data or personally identifiable information (PII), turn on this toggle to ensure that you are getting participants who have consented to sharing this type of information.
  5. Add Audience Criteria.

    The audience criteria are based on profile data from the third party sample provider. This is where you define the traits of audience you are trying to reach.

    Note: If you don't see the audience criteria you need listed here, you must ask participants for the information in your survey and use survey logic to advance or disqualify participants.
    1. Select the criteria.
    2. Set the operator.
      The operators vary depending on the profile data type.
      Profile data type Operators
      • Numeric (for example, Age)
      • Between
      • Is
      • Single Choice
      • Multiple Choice
      • Is
    3. Enter the audience criteria values.
      Operator Description
      Between Specify the start and end of the numeric range.
      Is Select the check boxes beside all applicable values.
    4. Click Add Filter to add another filter condition.
    5. Click the remove button beside a filter condition to remove it.
  6. Type the Incidence Rate.

    The incidence rate is an estimate of the percentage of people who received the invitation and who meet your criteria, after the targeting variables specified under Audience Criteria are taken into account.

    For example, let's say you want to target female participants between the ages of 18 and 34 who have attended a live theater event in the last 6 months.

    You can control for gender and age by sending invitations to only females ages 18-34. That's what happens when you define age and gender under Audience Criteria. Therefore, you only have to focus on the "has attended a live theater event in the last 6 months" part and the percentage of participants who meet this condition will be your incidence rate.

    To estimate your incidence rate:

    • Separate your criteria into two groups: the ones you can target with Audience Criteria and the ones you can't.
    • For the criteria you can't target, estimate the percentage of the targeted population that meets each condition.

    Here are some key considerations regarding incidence rate:

    • An incidence rate below 40% indicates a demographic that may be difficult, expensive, or impossible to find. Consider loosening your criteria to increase the number of potential participants. Alternately, please work with Alida's Managed Services team to get a custom quote.
    • The more conditions you add, the smaller the number of potential participants who can meet all of them.
  7. When you are finished, click Estimate Credits.
    Result: The Estimated Credits calculator on the right-hand side updates and displays how many credits are required for your desired external audience.
  8. To update audience details and get a new estimate, click Edit.
  9. To proceed with the distribution, click Confirm.
  10. Click Send Survey.
  11. Click Confirm and Spend Credits to confirm the credit deduction from your account.