You now have the option to invite external participants to join your Prolific studies through dedicated registration links. You can create and share these links from your Prolific account, allowing the people you invite to skip our participant waitlist. Once they sign up, they will join the participant group of your choice, ready to participate in your studies and others.
Our 'bring your own participants' (BYOP) feature allows you to streamline your research by having all your participants in a single place:
- Centralise your studies in a single platform, saving valuable time and resources.
- Easily invite participants to take your study and join dedicated participant groups that you can use for different studies.
- Focus on recruiting the right participants for your study needs, while Prolific manages study administrative tasks.
Please note that this feature is only available in workspaces which have spent £100/$125 on Prolific.
How do I create a registration link?
Click on ‘Participants’ on the left hand side of your workspace. Then select ‘bring participants’. You will see an option to create a new link by clicking on ‘new link’.
Adding criteria to your registration link
You will then be brought to the ‘new BYOP link’ page. Here you can fill in some details about your BYOP link. Some of the fields shown below are mandatory and some are optional.
You will be prompted to give your BYOP link a name and a description, these are only visible to you and are mandatory fields. You can then select whether you’d like participants who sign up using this link to be instantly added to a saved participant group on your workspace or you can create a new participant group. You can read more about participant groups here: participant groups.
You have the option to add the maximum amount of participants you’d like to sign up using your link and add an expiry date for your link. If you wish, you can also add up to a maximum of 5 prescreening questions with your preferred answers. If you add any prescreeners, only those who meet these criteria will be able to sign up using your link.
Only participants living in our allowed list of countries will be allowed to sign up using your link. These countries are:
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Chile
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Korea
Latvia
Luxembourg
Mexico
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States
You can read more about the participants allowed on Prolific here: Who are the participants on Prolific?
Once you are happy with the criteria you’ve added to your BYOP registration link, click on ‘confirm details’.
Adding prescreeners
To add prescreening questions to your BYOP link, click on ‘add screeners’. You will see a pop up containing all our available screener questions.
You can select up to 5 screener questions and your preferred answers. Once you’ve reached the limit of 5 questions, you’ll see the notification ‘You have reached the maximum of 5 screener questions.’
If you add one prescreener question with multiple answer options, the participant will be allowed to sign up if they choose any of your selected answers.
If you add multiple prescreener questions, the participant will only be able to sign up if they provide the desired answer(s) for every question.
Once you have added prescreener questions, they will appear as below. You have the option to edit and remove these.
Confirming your registration link details
Once you click on ‘confirm details’ you will see the pop up shown below. It’s important to review the information you've entered here to ensure it is correct. If anything is incorrect, please select cancel and go back to edit your criteria.
Once you have reviewed the registration link details and are happy they are correct, click on ‘create link’. Congratulations, your link is now active!
Please note: Once you click ‘create link’, details of the link cannot be changed
Active registration links
You will see a pop up on the top right hand side of your account once your link has been created successfully. You will also see that the link is showing as ‘active’ and the number of successful signups.
You will see your unique registration link. You can select 'copy' to copy the link directly or click on the social media icons to share your link via social media. When you click on the social media icon, a pre-filled template will generate in the respective social media platform.
Inviting participants to your studies
When you wish to invite participants to take part in a study, you just need to add the relevant participant group while setting the study up. Under the ‘recruit participants’ section of the study setup page, select ‘use a saved group of participants’. You can choose which participant group(s) to invite to the study.
You can read more about this section of the study setup page here: Setting up a study - audience.
Stopping a registration link
If you would like to deactivate an active registration link so that participants can no longer use your link to sign up, you can navigate to the bottom of the page and click ‘stop’. You will then see a pop up to confirm you want to stop the registration link.
If participants try to sign up after the link has been stopped or has expired, they will receive a message informing them that the link is no longer valid. They will still be able to sign up to Prolific if they would like to and will go onto our participant waitlist.
FAQs
Is there a limit to the number of links I can create?
No, there is no limit on the number of links that you can create and share with potential participants.
What kind of participants can I invite?
All participants on Prolific must be at least 18 years old and living in supported countries. You can see the list of countries Prolific supports for participants further up in this article, and you can also read more about this here: Who are the participants on Prolific?
As long as they meet these criteria, you can invite any participants whom you’d to invite to take part in your research!
Can I make participants only take my studies?
Once participants have signed up to Prolific using your registration link they will be able to take part in studies from yourself and from other researchers. It is not currently possible to limit participants to only completing studies from specific researchers.
How does it impact participant anonymity if I invite people I know?
Participants are anonymized when they sign up for Prolific. Depending on how many participants you invite, this may be sufficient to anonymize each participant in the group, as you will not know which participant has which Prolific ID. We are working on solutions to improve this - more information on this is coming soon.
Why can't I see as many participants in my participant group as I expected to?
When participants join Prolific they are required to complete certain steps before they can take part in studies, and this includes verifying their identity. If we are unable to verify the participant’s identity they will be informed that they unfortunately cannot take part in studies on Prolific. They will also be provided with a link to contact the Participant Support Team if they have any questions about this.
We have these checks in place so that we can maintain a high standard of participants. You can read more about this in our blog: Why participants get banned.
Participants who join successfully using your link will be added to your chosen participant group, but you won’t see if a participant you’ve invited has been unable to join Prolific.
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