Prolific connects researchers from 35,000 organizations with over 200,000 active research participants who earn rewards for participating in studies.

At OpinionX, we recommend Prolific as the best platform for recruiting survey participants for many reasons:

Follow these steps to create your project on Prolific:

You need to collect IDs from your participants to confirm on Prolific that they finished your survey so they can receive their reward/payment. Under the Recording Prolific IDs section you'll see the question "How do you want to record IDs?", with two options:

Here's a detailed look at each of these two approaches...

The screenshot below shows which component each number refers to.

Later on, when you've finished your research, you will export these IDs from OpinionX and import them to Prolific to confirm who should receive payment.

Below, we explain the more complex but automated URL Parameters method. If you're using the manual question approach explained above, feel free to skip this next section.

Asking participants to copy/paste their answers has two significant downsides — people make mistakes, and it requires more manual work from you as the researcher. To avoid these, some users opt for the more complex but automated approach of using URL Parameters.

URL Parameters means embedding data inside a URL that a website can then read and store. Here's an example to show how they work

In the second version, I'm hiding some info inside the URL so that the survey tool knows the participant's name is Daniel. The section after the = could be personalized for each person using the template: app.opinionx.co/customer-survey?name={{name}}

On Prolific, choosing the "URL Parameters" recording option shows three parameters Prolific asks you to record → PROLIFIC_PID, STUDY_ID, and SESSION_ID.

Here's how we set OpinionX up to collect these parameters...

First, go to the Enrichment Tab and click "Manual Setup".

Create three "Unique" data fields and name them as Prolific instructed.

To pull these three data points from Prolific into OpinionX, you'll need a Hidden Fields survey link, All you have to do here is click the "Hidden Fields" button on the Enrichment Tab:

Prolific uses a ? to indicate the start of the parameters section of the URL, so make sure to open the Advanced Settings section of the Hidden Fields menu and change the Query Type to a question mark (?).

When each participant opens this link, the recruitment platform will fill in the {{value}} sections with the relevant data:

Hit "Copy Link" on this menu to grab this full link. It should look something like this:

Paste that whole into the section on Prolific that says "What's the URL of your study?". You can see in the screenshot below what this should look like:

Once participants are finished your survey, you'll need to send them back to Prolific with a completion code. You can do this in one of two ways:

You only pick one of these two options, not both. Here's where you'll see them:

Here's an example of what the Redirect URL looks like:

As you can see, this has a URL parameter at the end, ?cc= (cc is 'completion code'). Both of these approaches use the same code, which in this case is CIGR78H4, regardless of whether you use the copy/paste or redirect methods. In that case, it's a lot easier to use the Redirect URL on OpinionX.

On your Setup Tab on OpinionX, scroll to the bottom of the page, hit "Edit Finish Page", and paste this completion code URL into the Redirect Link field, like in the screenshot below:

You can create multiple codes for different types of participants if needed, such as "Failed Attention Check" or "Incompatible". For this, check out our guide to Multiple Finish Pages so that you can send participants to Prolific with different codes.

Setup steps in the Recruit Participants section of Prolific (for most surveys).

For example, I want to recruit 500 men in Ireland, the UK, or the US, who are aged over 40 and own a cat. Prolific has 2,653 people matching this criteria who have completed a study in the past 90 days:

Prolific is a participant marketplace — that means that you're pitching to participants to try and get them interested in taking your survey (if they match your screening criteria). If you want, you can set the incentive to $0.10 for a 10 minute survey, but then it is very unlikely that anyone will be interested in completing your survey.

To get an accurate understanding of this, Prolific has a "Cost" section to their study setup. You put in the amount of time your survey will take (1) and how much you want to pay each person per minute (2). Prolific will show you how strong the equivalent hourly rate is and whether this will be appealing or not to participants (3).

To get a time estimate for your survey, click the "Preview" button on OpinionX and you'll see a time estimate on your survey's Welcome Page. Use this as the basis of your survey duration. This time estimate is the basis of their payment, not how long they actually take (ie. participants can't artificially inflate their completion time to get more money).

At the bottom of the Cost section of your study setup on Prolific you'll see a box titled "Calculate your recruitment time". This tells you how long it will take to fill your required number of participants based on your screening criteria, survey duration, and incentive price per minute. Increasing your price per minute will decrease the amount of time required to fill your survey:

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Everything I've displayed up until now is available completely free, both on OpinionX and Prolific. You can create your entire survey on OpinionX and setup all your recruitment requirements on Prolific without ever having to take your credit card out!

Prolific charges a mark-up on your recruitment fees which starts at 33.33% (at the time of writing this guide). Here's an example of how that works:

For more info on Prolific, I'd recommend checking out their extensive documentation library. For any questions about OpinionX just search our Knowledge Base, send us a message via our in-product live chat, or email [email protected].