Introduction to Panel Recruitment¶

You've built the survey. It's exactly what you wanted to ask. The problem is the same one every researcher eventually runs into: you don't actually have anyone to send it to, or the people you do have aren't the audience you actually need - a specific age range, a specific country, people who've used a specific kind of product. The usual fix is leaving your survey tool entirely, setting up a study in a separate panel platform, and manually reconnecting the two once responses come in.

Panel Recruitment skips the second tool. It's a live respondent panel built directly into Opionate - define your audience, fund a wave, and responses land straight in the same results you'd already be looking at for the rest of your survey.

What You're Actually Getting¶

Panel Recruitment gives you access to a live panel of more than 300,000 real respondents, active across 38+ countries, filterable by age, country, employment status, and 300+ other criteria from the panel's own catalog. Every participant goes through the panel's own vetting - dozens of quality checks - before they're even eligible to take your survey, so you're not gambling on who shows up to answer it.

This is a single-provider panel integration, not a marketplace of competing panel vendors - one live pipeline, not a menu of providers to compare and choose between.

The Basic Flow¶

Recruiting respondents happens in four steps: define your audience (the screening criteria that decide who's eligible), set your budget (how many responses you want, and what you're willing to pay per response), launch when ready, and responses land in your results - the same dashboard and reports you'd use for any other response to that survey, with no separate export or import step.

Each funded recruitment attempt is called a wave. You can run any number of waves for the same survey, at any time, with no cap - if one wave doesn't fill fast enough, or you simply need more responses later, launching another is the answer, not editing or extending an existing one.

What Panel Recruitment Isn't¶

It's not a way to review or hand-pick individual responses before they count - every submission goes through the panel provider's own approval process, and Opionate doesn't add a second layer of manual review on top of it. If a specific submission genuinely needs a second look, you file a report and platform staff resolve it on your behalf, directly with the panel provider, rather than approving or rejecting it yourself in the app. Our companion guide, Launching and Funding a Panel Recruitment Wave, and the Panel Recruitment FAQ both cover this in more detail.

It's also not a substitute for your own distribution list or existing audience - it's specifically for the situation where you need real respondents you don't already have access to.

FAQ¶

Do I need to leave Opionate to use Panel Recruitment?
No - the entire flow, from defining your audience to watching responses come in, happens inside the same workspace you built your survey in.

Is there a limit to how many waves I can run?
No - a survey can have any number of waves over its lifetime, and any number of them can be running at the same time.

Can I choose which panel provider to use?
Panel Recruitment is a single-provider integration rather than a marketplace of vendors to pick between - you're recruiting from the one live panel built into Opionate.

Do I know the cost before I commit?
Yes - you'll see the total cost of a wave before you launch it, based on the number of responses you want and the per-response amount you're offering. See Launching and Funding a Panel Recruitment Wave for the details.

Ready to recruit your first respondents? Build or open a survey, then head to Panel Recruitment from inside it to launch your first wave.