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Create a campaign

Purpose​

Set up the container that holds a round of assessment: its people, its assessments, its dates, and how people get in.

Who this is for​

Account administrators and campaign managers.

Before you start​

Decide two things, because they change what the rest of the setup looks like:

  • Private or public. A private campaign is invitation-only. A public campaign gets a public page at /public/campaign/<key> that anyone can open, with optional instructions, a document, and an "Apply to Take Part" button.
  • How people prove they belong. The campaign's Who may answer mode is one of three: anyone with the link, a shared campaign passcode, or invitation only. A registration form can sit alongside any of them — it is an extra door, not a fourth mode.

You can change all of this later in campaign Settings.

Create it​

  1. Open the account Dashboard (the first sidebar item).
  2. Choose New campaign in the top-right of the account header.
  3. Fill in the dialog:
    • Campaign Name — required.
    • Description — up to 500 characters. This is an internal note; it is never shown to visitors. Settings adds a separate Public description once the campaign is public (see Finish the setup).
    • Status — start in Draft unless you are ready for people to arrive.
    • Public campaign — leave unticked for a private campaign. New campaigns default to private.
    • Enable registration — on by default; it means the campaign expects applicants to come through a registration form.
    • Require passcode — reveals a passcode field when ticked. Read What a campaign passcode lets people do before you choose one: on a private campaign the passcode is enough to answer, with no account.
  4. Choose Create.

The campaign appears as a card on the dashboard with Draft / Active / Inactive and Private / Public badges. Choose the campaign's name on the card to open it; the gear icon beside it edits the campaign's properties without leaving the dashboard.

What a campaign passcode lets people do​

On a private campaign, the passcode is a door into the questionnaire, not only into the campaign. Anyone who opens /public/campaign/<key> and types it can answer, there and then, with no account and no invitation. Their response is anonymous: it is filed as a walk-up, exactly like a response on an open campaign, because a passcode says that somebody knows a shared secret and does not say who they are.

Some consequences worth knowing before you set one:

  • The passcode is as strong as you make it. Use Generate rather than typing a phrase. A typed passcode is refused if it is shorter than sixteen characters, if it uses fewer than six different characters, or if its letters are one or two common words — and Generate mints something that clears all three, so the button beside the field always produces a passcode the field accepts. Both dialogs say all three rules beside the field before you type. Common words are read in English and French, accents and all, and one word of each counts as two — though the French half covers base forms rather than every inflection, so it catches less than the English half does. Three or more words are allowed, but a campaign address is not a secret at all: it appears in URLs and on posters.
  • It is shared, so it travels. One person forwarding it hands on the same access they have. If you need to know who answered, invite people instead: an invitation mints a personal link, and only that link produces an identified response.
  • An address a walk-up types is a label, not a name we recognise. Where a questionnaire asks for one, we record it on the new entry that response creates — we never match it against your roster and file the answers under the person who owns that address. So somebody you invited who answers as a walk-up, without their link, appears on the roster twice: once as invited, once as a walk-up carrying the same address. That is deliberate. The alternative is that anyone who knows a colleague's address can file answers as them, on any campaign that accepts walk-ups. Reports that count PEOPLE fold the two entries back into one; counts of roster ENTRIES show both.
  • Changing the passcode ends every sitting that is using the old one. Setting a passcode, replacing it, or clearing it all count as a change. Anyone who typed the previous passcode is asked for the new one the next time they save a page — so if you rotate a passcode mid-wave, expect to hand the new one out to people who are already part-way through. That is what makes rotation worth doing when a code leaks: the old one stops working immediately, rather than staying good for the rest of the day.
  • Turning the passcode off does not turn the door off. A private campaign with no passcode is invitation-only, which is more restrictive, not less — but a passcode you set and then forget stays usable until you change it.
  • A passcode set before these rules keeps working. They apply when a passcode is written, never when one is checked, so an older campaign carrying a shorter code — or a two-word phrase — is not locked out and nobody has to be told to re-enter anything. You can still rename such a campaign, change its dates and edit everything else about it. The next time you change that passcode it will have to satisfy all three rules, and Generate is the fastest way there.

If none of that is what you want, leave Require passcode off and invite people. If you want anyone at all to answer, make the campaign public.

How many colleagues one respondent may bring in​

On a campaign whose assessments are answered by an organisation or by a department rather than by each person separately, anyone already taking part can invite colleagues into the same organisation. They create a link from My assessments or from the page they see after submitting, and send it on; each person who opens it agrees to take part for themselves before anything is recorded.

One link is worth ten newcomers unless you say otherwise. The number lives on the campaign, under shareLink.maxJoiners in the campaign's settings, and can be anything from 1 to 100. A value outside that range is pulled back into it rather than refused, so a mistyped setting never stops a respondent inviting somebody.

Four things are worth knowing before you change it:

  • The cap is fixed when a link is created, not when it is used. Lowering the number does not cut off links people are already holding, and raising it does not re-open a link that has already done its work. Set it before a wave rather than during one.
  • One person can only hold a few live links at a time. The cap limits each link; this limits how many links one respondent can have outstanding. They can withdraw a link they no longer need to free the budget.
  • Links last thirty days, and the person who created one can withdraw it at any time.
  • These people count as invited. On the Engagement tab they are on the invited side of the funnel, not with the walk-ups — because a named colleague on your roster asked them, and the record says who. A passcode walk-up is still anonymous and still self-serve; the two are deliberately different.

Nothing changes on a campaign whose assessments are answered by each person individually. There is no organisation to share, so the action is not offered and a request for one is refused with a message saying so.

Finish the setup​

Inside the campaign, Settings in the header opens the fuller editor. The sections that matter:

Campaign Info — display order, status, title, an internal note (never shown to visitors — see Public description below for the field that is), and a campaign image.

Campaign Admin — the Private/Public pill (which decides presentation on the public page), Who may answer — Anyone with the link / Passcode / Invitation only, the mode the join gate actually enforces — "Share with all account users", "Enable Passcode" and its value, "Enable registration step", and Contact address for respondents. Read Who a stuck respondent writes to before you fill that last one in: the address is published.

Campaign consent — off until you configure it, including on every campaign that already existed when this setting was added. Turning it on makes the campaign, rather than each questionnaire template, own the consent statement. The study owner supplies and approves all three required values: the English wording, the French wording, and a version identifier. Use a new identifier whenever the approved wording changes. The identifier is stored with the response for audit but is never shown to a participant.

Allow consent per assessment decides what a refusal closes:

  • Off: consent is asked before the participant's first assessment. A refusal closes the campaign for that participant, so its other assessments disappear from their open list.
  • On: a refusal closes only the assessment in front of them; the campaign's other assessments remain open. An individual assessment can also enable Ask for consent again inside this assessment in its own editor. That assessment-level switch is unavailable until campaign consent and Allow consent per assessment are both on.

An agreement to the current version is reused across the campaign unless an assessment is set to ask again. Publishing a new version asks again because the earlier agreement names different wording.

Campaign Lifecycle — up to ten open/close windows, each with an Opens and a Closes timestamp. Use these when a campaign runs in rounds.

Public Campaigns Page — only shown when the campaign is public. It gives you the public URL with a copy button, the Public link field that sets it (see The campaign's public link), and a Public description field — up to 500 characters, shown under the campaign's name on the public page itself. It is separate from the internal note in Campaign Info: leaving it empty shows no blurb rather than falling back to that internal text, so a coordinator's own working notes never reach an anonymous visitor. Below it are three rich-text editors, opened from Edit Campaign Instructions, Add 'Campaign Closed' Message and Add 'Campaign Archived' Message — the two messages are what visitors see once the campaign stops accepting responses. You can also attach a custom document (PDF or DOCX) and choose whether the public page shows the participant count and download count.

Contact person — assign one or more members as the campaign's named contacts. This is an internal assignment; it is not the address in the next section, and it is never shown to a respondent.

Choose Update to save.

A public campaign is reachable at a page anyone can open. Public link, in the Public Campaigns Page section, is the part of that address you choose. Leave it empty and the campaign keeps its dashboard link; fill it in and the campaign answers at /public/campaign/<your link> — the same address campaign invitation emails point at. The Public URL row above the field always shows the whole thing, with a copy button.

What you type is tidied before it is saved. The link is lower-cased, trimmed, and any slashes at the very start or end are dropped — so /Wave-A/ and wave-a are the same link, and typing either stores wave-a. The field shows you the result under the box (Stored and matched as …) and the Public URL row above it updates to match, so what you copy from that row is what visitors will reach.

It has to be free, and the field checks while you type. Public links are unique across the whole platform, not just your account, so a link may already belong to a campaign you cannot see. A moment after you stop typing the field says whether the link is free, taken, or not a usable link at all, and Update stays disabled until it is a link you can have. It never tells you whose campaign holds a taken link.

What makes a usable link: 3 to 200 characters, starting with a letter or digit, and made of letters, digits and - _ . : / ~ +. No spaces, no ?, no #. A full https://… address is accepted too, for a campaign you host somewhere else.

Changing it breaks the old address. Anything already handed out — a printed slide, a QR code, an email — stops resolving the moment you save the new link. Clearing the field does the same. Nothing redirects from the old link to the new one.

List the campaign on assessor.io​

List on assessor.io, in the Public Campaigns Page section, puts the campaign on the assessor.io home page, under Open now to all. Visitors see a card with its logo, its name, who it is for, how to join, the languages it runs in and when it closes, and an Open button that goes to its public link. It is off by default: nothing appears on the home page unless someone on your account switches it on.

A listed campaign shows only while it is open. It needs all of these at once: the switch on, a public link, a public page (the campaign is not Private), the campaign Active and inside its open-and-close dates, and your account active. When it closes it drops off by itself; a change you save shows on the home page within a few minutes.

Any way of joining can be listed. The card says how people get in — open to all, an access code, by invitation, or by application — so listing an invitation-only campaign advertises it without letting in anyone you did not invite.

Who it's for is an optional single line shown on the card, such as Asset owners or Students and graduates: plain text, up to 80 characters. Leave it empty and the card shows only how to join and the languages.

A copied campaign starts unlisted, even when the original is listed, so a clone never appears on the home page before you have finished setting it up.

Who a stuck respondent writes to​

A respondent whose link will not open — it was mistyped, it expired, it was reissued, or they reached a private campaign without an invitation — gets a screen explaining what happened and telling them to ask whoever invited them. Contact address for respondents is who "whoever invited them" is.

Leave it empty and nothing changes: the screen offers the platform's own contact form, and so do the public campaign page and the campaign sign-in page for an invitation-only campaign. Fill it in and all three offer your address instead, as a Contact <address> link that opens the visitor's mail app.

The address is published. Three things follow from that, and they are the whole reason this is optional:

  • It is shown to people who are not signed in and never will be. All three surfaces that render it are public: the campaign page at /public/campaign/&lt;key&gt;, which anybody can open; the campaign sign-in page at /auth/entry, which an uninvited visitor reaches by following a campaign link; and the link-failure screen, which is reached precisely by someone with no valid credential. There is no version of this that is shown only to invitees.
  • Use a shared address, not a person's. A wave inbox — bim-survey@example.org — survives someone leaving, absorbs the misdirected mail a published address attracts, and does not put one colleague's name on a page that may be indexed or forwarded.
  • You can take it back. Clearing the field and choosing Update removes it, and all three surfaces revert to the platform contact form on the next page load. Nothing is cached anywhere else.

It has to be a valid email address; Update stays disabled and the field explains itself until it is one.

What happens next​

  • A Draft campaign is invisible to participants even if an assessment inside it is published — set it Active when you are ready.
  • The campaign's overview shows Active assessments, Unique participants, Total submissions, Completion rate (cumulative) and Avg completion time, filtered by the date-range, participant-status and assessment controls above them.
  • Clone in the campaign header copies the campaign — see Run the next wave below, which is what it is for.

Run the next wave​

A wave is a campaign. There is no separate "wave" object and no "start round 2" button: you clone the campaign you just ran, and the copy is the next wave.

1. Clone. Clone in the campaign header asks first — Make a copy of "X"? — with two opt-ins, both off by default:

  • Also copy this wave's message templates. Off, because these are the only copied children addressed at people: a reminder body written for this wave carries this wave's dates. Tick it if you would rather edit them than rewrite them.
  • Carry the cohort into the copy. Off, because the same button also duplicates a campaign as a template to start a different programme, and that copy must not quietly acquire somebody else's roster. The hint tells you how many people it would copy, and how many units are complete in the wave you are cloning.

2. What the copy has. The questionnaires, their template versions, their labels, who answers each one and whether it is mandatory; the campaign's landing copy and every translated field; the recruitment and report targets; and the published structure, with every rule pointing at the copy's own assessments. It lands as a Draft with no opening or closing dates — set the new wave's dates before you make it Active, or it will run with no window.

3. What it does not have. No answers: submissions are never copied. No invitations: nobody has been asked yet. Not the source's join passcode — if the original was protected, the copy gets a freshly minted one, shown once in the acknowledgement dialog. Copy it before you close that dialog; it is hashed at rest and cannot be read back. Not the public link, which is unique and has to be minted again.

4. If you carried the cohort. Each person arrives with their name, organisation, labels, language and how they first joined the programme, as Invited, with no consent recorded — consent is taken again for every wave. Nothing they did last wave comes across: no completion, no started date, no reminder history, no "we already told them" flags. Two exceptions are named in the acknowledgement dialog:

  • Suspended people are left behind. Suspending somebody was a decision about that person; the copy does not overrule it. Add them to the copy deliberately if this wave should include them.
  • A refusal or a withdrawal carries forward. If somebody declined in the questionnaire, or withdrew, that stands — they are not asked again and are not counted as unknown. Everyone else's consent resets.

5. Invite. The copy has the people but has asked none of them. Send the invitations from the copy's participants tab when the dates are set — that is also when consent is asked again.

6. The same person, twice. Somebody who took the last wave may come back under a different address — a new employer, a personal address. Two addresses are two people to every count until you say otherwise: open them on the Engagement tab, use Same person as… in the person dialog, name the other address and confirm. Nothing is merged and nothing is deleted — both keep their own rows and their own answers — but from then on every count treats them as one person, and the dialog shows a Linked identity badge. You can undo it one address at a time.

The acknowledgement dialog after a clone also names the contact address the copy carries over from the original, because that address is published and the new wave may not be the old wave's to answer.

What each person sees: the four availability states​

An assessment is not simply "in the campaign or not". Once a campaign has a published structure, each assessment reads as one of four things for each person — and which one it is can change as answers come in.

  • Mandatory — they have to do it. It counts towards whether they are finished.
  • Optional — they may do it. It is offered, and nobody is chased for it.
  • Locked — it is theirs, but not yet: it depends on another assessment that nobody in their organisation, department or own record has finished. The refusal names the one that has to come first, so "not yet" never reads as "no".
  • Hidden — it is not offered to them at all. Either a rule says so, or the unit that answers it has no place for them: no organisation on their record, no department label, two department labels at once, or a department list that has been deleted.

Two things follow from this that are worth knowing before you write rules.

A campaign with no published structure behaves exactly as it always has. Every non-draft assessment is available and mandatory for everyone. Nothing changes until you publish a structure.

A locked assessment reopens the moment its source is finished — for everybody who shares it. If the Core Set is answered by the organisation, one colleague completing it unlocks the dependent for all their colleagues at once, not just for whoever pressed Submit.

If you see a warning on the campaign page saying an assessment is answered by a group that no longer exists, that assessment is hidden from everybody until it names a list that does exist. The person dialog on the participants tab carries the matching warning for one person — most often somebody carrying two department labels, whose department questionnaire is therefore answerable by nobody.

Limits and gotchas​

  • Creating a campaign does not create anything to answer. You still need to add an assessment — see Publish and preview an assessment.
  • There is no separate "campaigns" page. /<accountId>/dashboard/campaigns redirects to the account dashboard, which is where the campaign cards live.
  • Deleting a campaign is not offered in the interface. Set it Inactive instead.
  • Contact address for respondents is per campaign, not per account, and a clone carries it over with the rest of the settings. The clone's acknowledgement dialog says so and names the address — change it on the copy if the next round is somebody else's.
  • A carried cohort is not an invited cohort. The copy's roster is full and its outbox is empty; nobody hears anything until you send. That is deliberate — the dates are not set yet when the copy is made.
  • "Same person as…" never guesses. It will not suggest links from matching surnames or shared domains, and it refuses outright if the two addresses already belong to two different people you linked earlier — joining two groups is a bigger decision and has to be made deliberately.