Jisc banner

Online surveys  (formerly BOS)

Powerful, flexible online surveys

Changing respondent details ADVANCED

This Help page applies to surveys where survey access control has been enabled and a respondent list has been created.

If you have discovered an error in your respondent list information, you can change this at any time, even while the survey is open.

Note:  If you are capturing pre-populated information from your respondent list in the survey responses, changing the information in your respondent list will not have any effect on any responses that have already been submitted.

There are two ways to change respondent details:

  1. Amend each respondent manually, one at a time.
  2. Export the respondent list, make the changes, and then import the amended list.

Manually amending respondent records:

  1. On your Dashboard dashboard-icon, locate your survey and click Distribute.
  2. Go to survey access control icon Survey access control.
  3. Locate the incorrect respondent record by typing the username or email address associated with that record into the Filter by username to email box at the top of the respondent list.
  4. Make the required changes by typing directly into the relevant fields.  The information will be saved as soon as you click or tab into another field.

Exporting, amending and then importing:

  1. On your Dashboard dashboard-icon, locate your survey and click Distribute.
  2. Go to survey access control icon Survey access control.
  3. Under “Respondent export / import”, click export Export respondents.
  4. Save the file in a location where you can easily retrieve it.
  5. Open the exported file.
  6. Make the necessary changes.  Do not change any other details in the exported list.  Please be aware of the consequences of making the following changes to the respondent list file:
    • Blanking out the passwords will cause online surveys to re-generate passwords for your respondents when the file is imported.  If your respondents are using a username/password combination to access the survey their original passwords will no longer be recognised.
    • Blanking out the tokens will cause online surveys to re-generate personalised URLs for your respondents when the file is imported.  Your respondents’ original personalised URLs will no longer work.  This will also disable any ‘Finish later’ links.
    • Changing the usernames will result in online surveys creating new respondent records when the file is imported rather than amending the existing records.
  7. Save the amended file as a CSV.  You may wish to “Save as” so that you retain a copy of the original respondent list information for future reference.
  8. Go back to survey access control icon Survey access control.
  9. Under “Respondent export / import”, click import icon Import respondents.
  10. Click Browse to find the amended CSV file on your computer, then click Open.
  11. Ensure that the “Delete all existing credentials” box is not ticked.  This ensures that your existing respondent information is updated with the new information rather than being deleted and replaced.  Ticking this box will delete all of your existing respondent records.  The records cannot be retrieved once they have been deleted.
  12. Click Save.  The respondent records will be updated with any new/different information contained in the file you have imported.