Launching and Funding a Panel Recruitment Wave¶

A Panel Recruitment wave is one funded attempt to recruit real respondents from Opionate's live panel for a specific survey. This guide walks through building one, how it's priced, and what your options are once it's live.

Before You Start: Your Survey Needs to Be Live¶

A wave recruits real people to answer a real, working survey - so your survey needs to already be published at a real, reachable link before you can launch one. If you're still actively editing your questions, finish that first; a wave launched against a survey that gets substantially changed afterward is recruiting against a moving target.

Step-by-Step: Building a Wave¶

1. Open Panel Recruitment from inside your survey, and start a new wave. It's created as a draft immediately - nothing is sent to the panel provider yet, so you can save and revisit it as many times as you need while you get the numbers right.
2. Define your audience. Set the screening criteria that decide who's eligible - age, country, employment status, and hundreds of other filters from the panel's own catalog.
3. Set how many responses you want. This is your wave's target - the number of approved responses you're trying to collect.
4. Set your per-response reward. Opionate computes a minimum reward based on how long your survey is estimated to take to complete - you can offer more than that floor if you want to attract respondents faster, but never less. You'll see the total estimated cost of the wave, at your chosen reward, before you commit to anything.
5. Give it a name, if you want one. Leave it blank and it's automatically labeled by order ("Wave 1," "Wave 2," ...) so you can always tell your waves apart in a list.
6. Launch when ready. This is the one action that actually contacts the panel provider - up to this point, everything has been local to your own account, with zero effect on anything outside Opionate.

What Happens After You Launch¶

Once a wave is live, respondents from the panel start reaching your survey directly - there's no separate step to "publish to the panel" beyond the launch itself. Responses come in and land in the same Report tab you'd already be checking for the rest of your survey.

A wave can occasionally sit in a brief pre-launch review step before it actually reaches the provider. If you see this, it typically resolves on its own; if it persists, check that your account balance comfortably covers the wave's estimated cost.

A wave can be automatically paused if an unusually high share of respondents start it and don't finish. This is a protective measure, not something you did wrong - you'll see a plain-language note when it happens, and you can resume the wave once you've had a chance to look at what might be causing it (often something in the survey itself worth double-checking, like a broken question or a screening mismatch).

Refresh to see the latest status. Panel Recruitment doesn't poll the provider continuously in the background - reconciling a wave's status happens on demand, so use the Refresh action inside the wave to pull the latest picture rather than assuming a page you left open earlier is still current.

What You're Actually Charged For¶

You're only charged for submissions that reach a genuine outcome: an approved response at your full offered reward, or a screened-out response (someone who didn't qualify past your screening criteria) at a smaller, fixed rate that's set automatically and paid regardless of your survey's own reward setting. Every other outcome - someone who starts and never finishes, someone whose submission times out - isn't charged.

If a Wave Isn't Filling Fast Enough¶

You can't edit a wave's reward once it's live - that's a limitation of the panel provider itself, not a choice Opionate made. If a wave is filling too slowly, the answer is to launch another one rather than trying to modify the one that's already running. There's no cap on how many waves a single survey can have, and no requirement to stop an existing wave before starting a new one.

If Something Goes Wrong With a Specific Submission¶

There's no in-app approve/reject step for individual submissions - every submission is resolved through the panel provider's own process. If a specific submission genuinely needs a second look (suspected low-quality response, a payment issue, a technical problem, or a wave that seems stuck waiting on review), file a report from inside the wave and platform staff will follow up directly with the provider on your behalf. See our Panel Recruitment FAQ for the specific categories you can report.

FAQ¶

Can I change my screening criteria after a wave is live?
No - screening criteria, target response count, and reward are all locked in once you launch. If your criteria need to change, launch a new wave with the updated settings instead.

What happens to respondents I've already reached if I stop a wave early?
Submissions already in progress or completed at the time you stop a wave are still resolved and charged according to their outcome; stopping a wave only affects new respondents being recruited going forward.

Does a higher reward guarantee faster completion?
Not guaranteed, but a reward set above the computed floor is generally a lever worth pulling if a wave is filling slowly and you need results faster - see If a Wave Isn't Filling Fast Enough above.

Can I launch a wave before my survey is fully finished?
You can, but it's not recommended - substantially editing a survey's questions after real respondents have already started or completed it makes their responses harder to compare against ones collected before the change.

How do I know if a wave was auto-paused versus paused on purpose?
An automatic pause for an unusually high return rate shows its own plain-language explanation inside the wave - it won't look identical to a pause you triggered yourself.