ContextHelp:Send Survey Notification
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This page applies to Version 1.3.0 (February 2010)
There are two survey notification mechanisms, email and myWSU Notice. (The latter applies only to surveys sent to member of the Washington State University community.)
Messages have several parts:
- From
- Name and email address of message sender (myWSU Notices are not email and have no return email address)
- Subject
- Subject line for message, can contain survey or pool metadata
- Body
- The system will automatically insert a unique URL in place of the pseudo-metadata tag {{surveyurl}}. (Do not remove or alter {{surveyurl}}.)
Messages can contain metadata embedded from the survey system. Codes for those embedded metadata are documented here. The body of the email can contain other user-generated HTML.
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Message is sent to the email address of the respondent as recorded in the Respondent Pool. There are two methods for loading respondent emails.
How do I test email delivery?
See the relevant section in Testing_a_Survey.
The URL in the message does not work
Some email reading programs handle URLs in email differently than others.
A strategy that has been found to generally work is to compose the email body with text before and after the URL, with the URL as the only thing on a line by itself:
Please take my five minute survey about pets.
{{surveyurl}}
Thank you for your time
What happens to bounces?
If the email address is bad, the email bounces and the sender (identified in the process of creating the message) is notified.
What about SPAM filters?
As with any email, the recipient's SPAM filter may catch the email message. Use of an informative subject line and an informative message body (not just a link), avoiding the words that trigger SPAM filters, and the best recipe for success
We have discovered a problem sending URLs to users using the this method. Microsoft Exchange (and perhaps other campus email systems) will reject any message that has its origin outside the University's domain and the from field populated by an internal (within the domain) email address. This is the case of a non-WSU user sending an email from the system where the return address is the user's within campus email address. This is a kind of first stage identification of SPAM. In Exchange it gives a 556 error message. Workaround: Users can solve the problem by making sure that the From field is populated by an external (off-campus) address.
Can a message be sent more than once?
A message can be send more than once, and by checking the "Send notification only to respondents that have not completed the survey" only those respondents that have not completed the survey will be notified (**Note: Send only to non-respondents applies only to email notifications.)
Can message sending be automated?
At present, message sending is manual.
Can message sending be scheduled?
Subquestions:
- Can the message created ahead of time and then be sent when a particular respondent pool opens?
- Can reminder emails be scheduled for intervals within the time the survey is open, perhaps 48 hours before the survey closes?
At present message sending is manual and happens at the time of message creation, it cannot be scheduled. It is possible to send a message to only those who have not yet responded, but the sending itself is manual.
myWSU Notice
Washington State University only.
A message is sent using myWSU Notices to the course enrollment group maintained by the Registrar in Active Directory (and copied in near real time into Oracle Portal).
Does this work for all AD groups or only class sections?
No. It only works for class sections and a few other groups maintained in Oracle Portal. You would need to use email or posting of a URL to deliver to other groups. The AD related Delivery Modes can be used for other AD groups, but myWSU cannot be used to deliver the URL.
Categories: MyWSU | Messaging | Email | Version 1.3