Protection refers to "write-protection" for a survey. It means that when protection is on, you will be prevented from publishing changes to the survey while it is active. Publishing changes to an active survey can cause respondents who are in progress to lose their saved responses. The protection feature is designed to prevent this from happening. If you need to publish changes to an active survey, you can disable protection. However, be aware that this may also result in a loss of some data.
When you send an authenticated survey, each respondent receives a personal URL link that allows you to track who has responded. There are several considerations you should be aware of:
• Anonymity - Authenticated surveys are not anonymous. When a survey is authenticated, there is a link between the response and the respondent. Unauthenticated surveys are completely anonymous.
• Repeatability - An authenticated survey can only be taken once. Unauthenticated surveys can be take an unlimited number of times. This means that authentication lets you control who takes the survey.
• Reminders - If a survey is authenticated, reminders will only be sent to users who have not responded. If the survey is not authenticated, reminders go to everyone because there’s no way to know who has responded.
• Accessibility - An authenticated survey can only be taken from a unique link in an email invitation or by providing an authentication key if clicking a generic link. If authentication is turned off, anyone who knows the URL for your survey can submit a response(s). Users can easily forward their email invitation to others. This is something you want to consider carefully, particularly if you offer incentives for completing the survey. You have no control over who responds to your survey, how many times they respond or the relevancy of information they provide.
• Prepopulation - Authentication must be turned on if you choose to use pre-population to gather survey data on the back-end. When you upload an email list with the data import wizard and enable population, Engage7 Survey will automatically turn authentication on.
• Tracking - An authenticated survey provides tracking information. You can gather statistics related to the response rate. In addition, you can see a list of exactly who has responded and who has not. An unauthenticated survey has no tracking information.
When you send invitations with an email list, the invitation contains a 'Click here to begin...' link. For an authenticated survey, the authentication key is embedded in the URL and is completely transparent to the user when they click the link to respond.