In principle, every survey is always anonymous. If you do not explicitly ask for personal data or use a technical method for personalization, the easyfeedback system cannot identify which person participated in the survey.
The basic technical setup is anonymous
When you create a survey on easyfeedback, it initially consists of an empty questionnaire and has a unique survey link.
After you have added one or more questions to your survey and sent the link to 100 people, easyfeedback cannot show you which participants have clicked on the link. Since easyfeedback is not linked to any other systems that could be used to exchange data, no data can be transmitted to other systems via third-party services.
IP addresses or cookies are not identifiers
You can prevent multiple participation in the survey settings. To offer this technically, our system reads the IP address of each participant.
After the readout, the IP address is converted into a non-reverse-encryptable hashtag and only then stored at easyfeedback. Thus, at no time is an IP address of a participant stored on the easyfeedback server.
If this mechanism did not take place and IP addresses were stored, it would still not be possible to draw any conclusions about a person’s identity. However, since easyfeedback does not store IP addresses as a matter of principle, no IP address is available – and there is no need to worry.
The cookies used when opening a survey behave similarly. In the participant’s browser, the cookie is only set to check whether this browser has already participated before. Here, too, no connection can be made to a person’s identity.
In summary, every survey at easyfeedback is therefore fundamentally anonymous.
Establish or avoid personal connection
In order to guarantee the anonymity of persons, no personal data such as name, email, address, etc. may be requested in surveys. This is because the request for personal data can create a connection to a person, which means that the survey is no longer anonymous.
Likewise, asking for a customer number or the department of an employee, for example, is personalization. It should therefore be clarified from the outset whether the request for such information is relevant and necessary if the anonymity of the participants in a survey is to be ensured.
Activate anonymity function
In addition and also in principle, the anonymization function can be activated. With this function, all technical means and statistics are anonymized in such a way that no identification to a person is possible.
Furthermore, the participant will be shown information within the survey that the participation in the survey is anonymous.
Anonymous invitations by email
It is often desired to send the invitations to a survey by email – even for an anonymous survey. At first glance, this seems contradictory, but easyfeedback has taken this into consideration.
Basically you have two options:
- You invite your participants to the survey independently by email. In this case, you simply copy the survey link and paste it when sending the emails.
As indicated earlier, with this option, every participant receives the same link, which means that no connection can be made to individual people. - You use the email invitation tool from easyfeedback.
To invite survey participants via the email invitation tool, you must first upload a participant list. The invitations are then sent to the email addresses stored there.
Within the participant list, you can enter additional information: Title, first name, last name, reference text (personalization) & individual columns.
The first columns such as email, title, first name and last name will not be associated with the results at any time. This is not intended and cannot be set. Only from the reference text column onwards can and will the data be transferred to the evaluation.