Recruiting participants

There are three ways to get participants into a study:

1. Bring your own — share the study link or embed the study in your product.
2. Your audience — invite contacts you’ve saved in Versive via email outreach.
3. The participant panel — recruit vetted participants through Versive’s Prolific or Respondent integrations.

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Your audience

The Audience is your organization’s contact list — a lightweight research CRM.

• Import contacts in bulk (deduplicated by email) or add them individually, with arbitrary metadata fields that become filterable columns.
• Add contacts to any study in one step: each gets a personal tracked interview link.
• Contact statuses track deliverability and consent — unsubscribed and bounced contacts are automatically excluded from future sends.

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The participant panel

The Recruit tab connects your study to consumers and professionals through two panel providers:

• Prolific is suited to fast consumer and general-population studies, with a searchable catalog of built-in audience filters.
• Respondent is suited to B2B and harder-to-reach professional audiences, with custom targeting criteria and screener questions.

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Setting up a Respondent project

1. Define your target audience — B2C or B2B targeting with demographics (age, education, household income, and more) and professional attributes (industries, skills, seniority, company size).
2. Add screener questions — multiple choice, checkboxes, text, numeric, or slider-scale questions that qualify participants before they reach your study.
3. Set the incentive — as a rule of thumb, budget about $1 per minute of study length; B2B audiences typically require more.

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Setting up a Prolific project

1. Set the participant count, estimated duration, and reward. Versive displays the estimated total, including provider fees, before checkout.
2. Search Prolific’s filter catalog and add the demographic or behavioral criteria you need. You can assign distribution quotas across selected filter values.
3. Review the audience and cost, then choose Pay and publish. You can pause or resume recruitment from the project afterward.

Prolific projects cannot use Versive screen-out or redirect logic. Qualify the audience with Prolific’s built-in filters instead; Versive creates the required completion codes and sends participants back to Prolific automatically.

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Tracking recruitment

Panel projects have a lifecycle of Draft → Active → Closed / Archived and can be paused, resumed, duplicated, or closed. Respondent projects show funnel counts such as requested, invited, survey taken, qualified, and paid. Prolific projects show each submission’s live status and let you approve, reject, or bulk-approve responses awaiting review. Closing a Respondent project approves completed respondents for payment. You can also export Respondent profiles (name, job title, company, LinkedIn, skills, location, match quality) to CSV.

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Which approach when?