Recruit new respondents using Sprig’s built-in panel solution. Build a Survey, specify the characteristics of the audience you need to reach, understand costs immediately, launch and collect high-quality responses quickly.

​

Overview

Sprig Panels let you recruit verified, screened participants from a curated research panel and deliver your survey directly to them. This is useful when you want to:

• Reach people outside your existing user base
• Test concepts or ideas with a fresh audience
• Understand brand perception from non-customers
• Avoid over-surveying your own users

​

Accessing Panels

Panels require credits, which are purchased annually through your Sprig Sales or Customer Success contact. Once you’ve purchased credits you’ll be able to access the Panels functionality inside Surveys. If you need more credits during the year you can always purchase more. 

​

Creating a Panel

Panels are created within a Survey (i.e. link survey, previously known as a Long-Form survey). You can add a panel to a new or existing survey.

​

To create a panel:

1. Navigate to a new or existing Survey and click Edit.
2. Go to the Audience tab.
3. Toggle Sprig Panel on. Note: Sprig Panel and Email distribution cannot both be active on the same survey at this time.
4. A Panels tab will appear in the survey builder. Click Next at the bottom of the Audience tab to proceed to this tab.
5. Click Create New Panel and fill in the required fields.
6. Save as a draft and return later, or continue to configure recruitment criteria.

Draft panels launch automatically when you launch the survey. 

​

Required Panel Information

When creating a panel, you’ll provide:

• Panel Name (Public): visible to participants, so make it clear and descriptive.
• Panel Description (Public): shown to participants before they decide to take part. This description can be up to 5,000 characters.
• Number of participants: the total number of completed responses you need.
• Survey length: your estimated completion time in minutes. This helps participants decide if they want to participate and is used in cost calculations for incentives.
• Credits per completed survey: Sprig calculates this for you based on your number of participants and survey length. 

Note: You can run multiple panels on a single survey to, for example, target different audience segments.

​

Defining Recruitment Criteria

After filling in the basic panel info, you can define who you want to recruit by adding criteria. There are over 300 available filters, and many categories including:

• Location
• Gender
• Age
• Employment Status
• Industry
• Job Title
• Company Size
• Household Income
• Education

As you make selections and save, Sprig shows you a live count of how many participants match your criteria and updates the estimated total cost.

​

Adding Quotas and Screener Questions

If you need more precise targeting than the filters provide, you can add screener questions directly in the survey by using Sprig’s built-in quota criteria. Screener questions act as in-survey filters, and participants who don’t qualify are “screened out” and not shown the full survey. When using screeners:

• Always set your panel recruitment criteria first. Criteria determine who sees the study; screeners further qualify within that pool.
• Set Screen-out slots to define how many screened-out participants you’ll allow. This field CAN be updated as needed, even after the panel and survey are launched.
• Make sure your quotas don’t conflict with the panel filter criteria you’ve already set.
• Screened-out participants receive a nominal payment, but will not receive the full incentive.

​

Launching a Panel

1. Save your panel configuration.
2. Preview and test the survey as you normally would.
3. Launch the survey. Any draft panels launch automatically at the same time.

After launch:

• You can increase the number of participants or screen-out slots while the panel is running.
• You can add new panels to a live survey at any time.
• You can pause and resume a panel. Panels also pause automatically if the survey is paused.
• You can cancel a panel at any time if you no longer need it to continue.
• No other edits can be made to a panel after launch. Plan your criteria and configuration carefully before going live.

​

How Participants Experience the Survey

Once launched, your study becomes available to participants who match your recruitment criteria. Participants see the panel name, description, estimated length, and compensation before deciding to take part. When a participant chooses to take the survey, it opens in a new tab. After completing it, they’re automatically redirected back and their completion is recorded in Sprig, no manual code entry required. Sprig tracks participant IDs to ensure no one is invited to the same study more than once, even across multiple panels on the same survey.

​

Reviewing Responses

Responses appear in your survey dashboard as they come in, just like any other survey type.

​

Response Statuses

​

Approving, Rejecting, and Excluding Responses

Within 48 hours of a response coming in, you can:

• Approve a response: simply by doing nothing. 
• Reject a response: if the participant demonstrably did not complete the survey in good faith. Rejection prevents payment to the participant, and the participant is notified. You can undo a rejection if done accidentally.
• Note: rejection is a serious action. Only use it when a respondent has clearly violated the terms of participation. There is a limit to how many responses you can reject per panel.
• Exclude a response from analysis: If you want to remove a response from your analysis without rejecting it, use Exclude from Analysis instead. The response is preserved, and the participant will be paid, but the response won’t appear in your Data tab or response counts.

​

Tracking Panel Progress

Monitor panel performance from the Response tab of your survey. In the top section you’ll progress against your target number of participants and the number of participants screened-out if the survey includes quotas.

​

Panel States

​

Monitoring Credit Usage

Your team’s overall panel credit balance and usage can be found in Settings > Team > Usage. The panel section shows:

• Total credits purchased for the year
• Credits used to date
• Estimated credits reserved for open (in-progress) panels

The estimated credit usage for each panel is automatically calculated during Panel build, and deducted from your available balance upon launch so you always have an accurate picture of your remaining credits. To reclaim credits from a panel you no longer need, complete the panel.