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Purpose

A research panel is a pre-recruited group of participants who have agreed to take part in multiple surveys over time. Building your own panel enables you to:
  • Conduct research with a well-understood audience
  • Target specific demographics or user profiles
  • Distribute surveys quickly without recruiting new participants each time
  • Track participant engagement and responses over time

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Formbricks Approach

Formbricks provides all the tools you need to build and manage a research panel:
  • Profiling surveys to collect participant demographics and preferences
  • Contact management to store and organize panel member data
  • Segments to group participants by attributes for targeted research
  • Personal links to distribute unique survey links to specific panel members

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Overview

Building a research panel with Formbricks involves these key steps:
  1. Create a profiling survey to collect panel member information
  2. Export responses and prepare contact data
  3. Upload contacts into Formbricks
  4. Create segments to group panel members
  5. Create research surveys and distribute personal links

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Step-by-step guide

1

Create a profiling survey

Start by creating a survey to collect essential information about your panel members. This profiling survey should gather:
  • Contact information: Email, name, and any identifiers you need
  • Demographics: Age, location, occupation, etc.
  • Preferences: Product usage, interests, or other relevant attributes
To create your profiling survey:
  1. Go to app.formbricks.com and click Create Survey
  2. Choose a blank survey or start from a template
  3. Add questions to collect the data you need for segmentation
  4. Include a Contact Info question type to capture email addresses Contact Info question type
2

Collect profiling responses

Distribute your profiling survey and collect responses from potential panel members. You can share the survey via:
  • Direct link
  • Email
  • Social media
  • Your website
Wait until you have collected a sufficient number of responses to build your panel.
3

Download the responses CSV

Once you have collected responses, export them for processing:
  1. Navigate to your profiling survey’s Summary page
  2. Click the Download button
  3. Select CSV format
  4. Save the file to your computer Download responses CSV
This CSV contains all the profiling data from your respondents.
4

Download the example contact upload CSV

To understand the required format for uploading contacts, download the example CSV:
  1. Go to the Contacts section in your project
  2. Click Upload Contacts
  3. Download the Example CSV to see the required column structure Download example contacts CSV
The example CSV shows you the format Formbricks expects for contact uploads, including required fields like email and optional attribute columns.
5

Map profiling responses to contact attributes

Transform your profiling survey responses into the contact upload format:
  1. Open both CSV files (responses and example template)
  2. Create a new spreadsheet matching the upload template structure
  3. Map each profiling survey question to a contact attribute column:
    • Email → email column
    • Name → firstName, lastName columns
    • Other answers → Custom attribute columns
Example mapping:
Survey QuestionContact Attribute
”What is your email?”email
”What is your name?”firstName, lastName
”What industry do you work in?”industry
”How large is your company?”companySize
”What is your job title?”jobTitle
6

Upload contacts to Formbricks

Import your panel members into Formbricks:
  1. Go to the Contacts section
  2. Click Upload Contacts
  3. Select your prepared CSV file
  4. Review the attribute mapping
  5. Complete the upload
Your panel members are now stored in Formbricks with their profiling attributes.
7

Create segments for targeting

Group your panel members into segments based on their attributes:
  1. Go to the Contacts tab
  2. Click Create Segment Create a new segment
  3. Define filter conditions based on the attributes you collected:
    • Example: industry equals “Technology” AND companySize equals “50-200”
    Attribute filter
  4. Name your segment descriptively (e.g., “Tech SMB Professionals”)
  5. Save the segment
Create multiple segments for different research needs. Learn more about Advanced Targeting for detailed segmentation options.
8

Create a research survey

Now create the survey you want to distribute to your panel:
  1. Click Create Survey
  2. Design your research survey with the questions you need
  3. Configure survey settings as needed
  4. Publish the survey
9

Generate personal links for your segment

Distribute unique survey links to your panel segment:
  1. Navigate to your research survey’s Summary page
  2. Click Share survey
  3. Select the Personal Links tab
  4. Choose the segment you want to survey from the dropdown
  5. Optionally set an expiry date for the links
  6. Click Generate & download links Personal Links
You’ll receive a CSV file containing unique survey links for each panel member in the segment. Learn more about Personal Links.
10

Distribute your survey

Send the personal links to your panel members using your preferred method:
  • Email marketing platform
  • Direct email
  • SMS
  • Any other communication channel
Each panel member receives their unique link, and their responses will be automatically attributed to their contact record.

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Benefits of this approach

BenefitDescription
Response attributionKnow exactly who responded to each survey
Targeted researchSurvey specific segments without bothering others
Panel managementMaintain a centralized database of research participants
ReusabilityUse the same panel for multiple research projects
Data enrichmentBuild up participant profiles over time with each survey

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Next steps