Once you've set up your moderated study, you can begin to send out invitations to your audience to collect interest in participation. This article explains how to recruit participants from your own audience for Interviews. If you're interested in recruiting participants from our panel, please check out this article instead.

From within your study, click Recruit from the progress bar at the top of the page to move to the recruitment stage:

From your dashboard, you can navigate directly to the recruitment page by clicking the Recruit button on the desired study:

Click Create a link. This will generate a unique link that you can send to your participants. This link will automatically save to your Recruit page, but you can disable it from within the link setup or directly from the Recruit page at any time.

You can create multiple links for the same study if you're sending your invitations out to different segments of participants. To do this, click Back to recruitment options once you've filled out the details of your first link, and create another.

By default, your link will be set to Automatic selection. With automatic selection, eligible participants will immediately be able to book sessions based on the availability you've set in your calendar. This is recommended for studies with single or multiple-choice screener questions, or no screener questions at all. Participants who qualify through the screener will immediately see booking options. If there are no screeners, the participants who receive your link will immediately be able to book a session.

With Automatic selection, you'll need to set a limit of eligible participants who can automatically book a session. After this number of sessions is reached, you can still manually send out invitations from the Applications page.

Handpick selection doesn't allow participants to immediately book after completing the screener questions. Rather, participants will see a thank you screen with a message that they'll be notified if they're successful in proceeding through the study. Handpick selection is there for studies with short or long text screeners, as you will need to review the answers to see if they match your requirements. You can also use this option if you simply prefer to manually select and send invitations to specific participants.

You can review applicants and manually send invitations from the Applicants page of your study.

If you plan to offer incentives for participants who complete your moderated study, you can specify that by clicking the incentive icon and entering the type of incentive you are offering, e.g. a $25 Amazon gift card:

Participants will see the incentive in their invitation and you can track the incentives you've provided on the Sessions page of your study.
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Incentives for self-recruited users will need to be manually paid out. At this time we don't have a system to automatically collect and provide incentives for self-recruited users.

Once you've completed your link setup, it's time to let your audience know you're looking for their participation! Copy the link, either from within the link setup or directly from the Recruit page, and send it out to your audience in whichever channel you prefer.

Once participants have clicked the link, they will be asked to enter their name and email address, answer screener questions if applicable, and book a session if eligible (and if you've chosen automatic selection). Once the form has been completed, you will see their information on the Applications page of your study.

While you can recruit an unlimited amount of sessions from the Lyssna panel for your Interviews, each of our plans includes a fixed number of sessions that you can book in a given month with your own audience. Those plan inclusions are as follows:

The limit applies to the month in which sessions are booked, not necessarily when they are conducted. For example, say you are on the Basic Plan and we are in the month of November (let's assume that the limit resets on the 1st of each month). You have set up an interview study to commence in December, but begin recruiting 10 participants from your network in mid-November. If say 5 participants make the booking in November, then these 5 will count towards your limit for November. If another 5 participants make the booking in December, then these 5 will count towards the limit for December.

You can check how many sessions you have booked with your own audience in a given month by clicking "Session limit" in the top right of your dashboard. Once the limit has been reached you will be unable to send invitations to your own audience for the remainder of the month in your billing cycle. Any unused sessions will not roll over to the next month.

If you are billed annually, this limit will reset on the same day of each month, e.g. if your billing cycle is from January 15, 2024 - January 14, 2025, your session limits will reset on the 15th of every month throughout the year.

Check out our article on Managing participant applications for Interviews to see what comes next!