Leverage Rally's external panel integration to tap Respondent’s multi-million engaged participant database to recruit non-users, prospects, and lookalikes around the world all without leaving Rally. No Respondent account needed! Learn more about recruitment.
How External Panel Recruitment Studies in Rally Work
Set up your study and screener in Rally, and target an audience you want to recruit.
See total estimated costs upfront, and reserve the necessary funds from your selected research budget only once you officially start recruitment.
Respondent quickly works to match your target audience with the best participants.
Watch applicants roll in, review and approve qualified participants to join your study.
Track study progress in Rally, and reject any participants that don't make the cut.
Only pay for participants you invite that are a good match and complete the study.
Close your study to permanently stop recruitment, release unused reserved funds, and receive a final billing details receipt.
🚨 Participation limit cannot be increased after you start recruitment. Consider setting the limit to the highest potential number of participants you may wish you invite, as you can always close your study early before the limit is met to stop recruitment, finalize payment, and release the remaining unused reserved funds.
Find the Perfect Target Audience
Visit or download our Panel Book to see the profile of the 3M+ engaged participants in Respondent's panel and learn more about the audiences you can now easily recruit.
With our Respondent integration, you can recruit B2B & B2C participants in:
150+ countries
146 industries
689 occupation categories
138,652 job titles
70,000 skills
Target participants by job title, industry, skills, demographics, location, and more to ensure you do research with only the perfect participants. Respondent continues to invest in recruiting more quality participants for your research with panel growth averaging ~50K+ new qualified participants per month!
B2C vs B2B Audience Type
From the start, it's crucial to identify which audience type should be targeted for the research being conducted, as this helps determine which types of participants Respondent contacts directly when recruiting applicants for your study.
B2C (business to consumer or "general population") research will help you understand end-users who [may] directly purchase your products and services. This typically focuses on the consumer experience, with feedback collected through direct interview questions, unmoderated tests, surveys, focus groups, and so on.
B2B (business to business or "industry professionals") market research targets business professionals and organizations. The goal is to understand business decision-making, gather "customer" feedback on existing products and services, generate new product development ideas, and identify new customer segments.
Audience Filtering and Targeting: Who Can Apply?
Understand who can and cannot apply to your Study based on the criteria specified during the Audience step of Study creation. It’s important to be specific about who you are targeting to help Respondent source the best applicants.
Filtering
You can filter the audience based on Location and Gender. Participants who do not meet these criteria will not be able to apply to your Study.
You can also filter based on past participation to only allow participants to apply if they have never participant in a project with your organization, or allow previous Study participants to apply by leaving this setting as "Any."
Targeting
You can target specific Industries or Job Titles. Targeting with these criteria helps Respondent contact the most relevant participants to apply for your Study, but participants who do not meet these criteria will be able to apply to your Study.
If want participants from specific career backgrounds, employment, industries, job titles, or skills to qualify for your research, you can set up your screener questions to capture more information, use conditional logic to mark participants as "Auto qualified" or "Auto disqualified" based on their responses, and view their Participant Profile for more info.
Qualifying
You can qualify participants based on Education, Ethnicity, Age, and Household Income. Participants who do not meet these criteria will be able to apply to your Study, but they will be shown as a "Poor Match" or "Partial Match" in the Recruitment Criteria Match column in Rally.
How Applicants Are Recruited
When you start recruitment for your study in Rally, Respondent works vigilantly to match your target audience with the best participants. Then, you get to choose who to invite in Rally from the participants they match to your study.
Respondent recruits research participants in three ways.
Pushing the Study to their marketplace of research participants to match the criteria of already signed up participants and promoting the study if they are a likely match. Likely matches will receive email notifications prompting them to apply.
Publishing via a network of online publisher partners to reach niche populations, including targeted ad networks, LinkedIn, and targeted places across the web.
Encouraging the sharing of research opportunities among networks of professionals. For example, the people who know the most designers are other designers, and the people who know the most teachers are teachers.
Recruitment Best Practices
Rally and Respondent use the information from your Study details in Rally to screen and recruit participants, meaning your attention to detail and taking the time to ensure your Study is set up carefully and intentionally from that start is important to receiving the best matches. Follow these best practices for quick and successful recruitment!
Use clear and descriptive external study names and study descriptions so that applicants can easily tell at a glance whether they are the right fit before applying, while being careful not to provide information that may bias the screener responses.
Participation limit cannot be changed after you start recruitment. Consider setting the limit to the highest potential number of participants you may wish you invite, as you can always close your study early before the limit is met to stop recruitment, finalize payment, and release the remaining unused reserved funds.
Incentivize properly based on audience type, required time, and methodology. This is especially important when recruiting industry professional B2B participants targeting specific industries, job titles, seniority levels, company sizes, or skills.
Honestly approximate the total time required from participants for your study, including the estimated time to complete the screener combined with the interview duration or estimated time to complete the unmoderated test. Example: A $15 incentive is totally reasonable for a 5-minute project, but participants don't really believe that it's a 5-minute project, so smaller projects may have lower engagement because participants (esp. B2B participants) won't consider it worth their time.
Set up well-thought-out screener questions and conditional logic to filter out poor matches. You won't be able to ask follow up questions before deciding who to invite, so take time to make sure your screener will provide the context you need.
Set up conditional logic on screener questions to automatically label applicants that should potentially be invited or rejected at a quick glance. Conditional logic in external panel recruitment studies will not invite or reject applicants, but can help to prioritize reviewing "auto-qualified" applicants first when deciding who to invite.
💰 Incentive Calculator Calculate the right incentive amount to recruit high quality participants for your study based on the audience & methodology used.
📖 Panel Book Understand the audience types available in Respondent's panel.
👌 Rally Blog: Recruitment Best Practices Deciding whether to recruit from your internal database of users or from an external panel can significantly impact the quality and relevance of your insights. Our guide can help navigate this decision, along with some best practices for effective external recruitment.
With Rally's flexible fund management, use Rally’s Research Budgets to manage and apply funds across both Respondent incentives and recruitment fees, and internal incentives. Learn more about recruitment pricing.
Create an External Panel Recruitment Study
Learn more about each step of the study setup process and the audience targeting options available by visiting our dedicated articles for each study type.
After creating an external panel study, add funds to a workspace budget as needed.
Then, start & manage external panel recruitment to begin conducting research.
Recruitment Pricing Guide
Rally offers a straightforward and flexible pricing model for external participant research sessions, eliminating the need for complex credit systems. Once you have funds loaded into your Rally workspace, you can leverage Respondent recruitment + incentives at the following rates.
Recruitment Fees
Audience & Study Types | First 100 Sessions | >100 sessions |
Moderated B2B | $65 | $40 |
Unmoderated B2B | $43 | $26 |
Moderated B2C | $39 | $24 |
Unmoderated B2C | $26 | $16 |
Running more than 1000 sessions a year? Contact us for pricing.
Note: Discounted rates applied within a contract period.
Incentive Fees
The incentive amount per session is also deducted from the overall project fee. Incentive amounts are set by the Rally user.
How It Works
Funds Management: Set Up and Fund Budgets to load funds into your Rally “workspace budget” via Invoice or via Credit Card.
Study Quote and Budget: When a study is published, before recruitment is officially launched, Rally provides a quote based on the rate card (above). Choose which workspace budget to pull from during study setup, and when starting recruitment the quoted amount is reserved from the selected budget.
Session Execution: After participants are invited by the user and the sessions occur, the reserved funds are officially deducted on a per participant basis.
Cancellations: If a study is canceled, the unused reserved funds are released and returned to "Available" in the overall workspace budget.
External Panel Recruitment FAQ
ℹ️ What if my project is not matched with enough participants?
If matches aren’t made in a reasonable amount of time, Respondent’s referral algorithm will find participants beyond its pool of 3 million with a potential reach of over 500 million.
ℹ️ How does Respondent prevent research participant fraud?
Respondent verifies participant work emails every 90 days, detects for screener response inconsistencies, features participant quality scoring and AI-powered monitoring, and more.