Quick Start Guide

1. Add a new project

Each project involves the following parts: 

  • Activities: chats, video sessions, diaries, discussion boards, questionnaires, and other modules.
  • Participants: respondents, moderators, clients, or visitors
  • Emails: invitation, reminders, or follow-ups

To create a project, define the basic project settings first – the project name, language, time zone and the start date. There are many other attributes in the project settings (points, consents, customization, etc.) but they are not required in the beginning. 

How respondents join the project: each project has its unique URL address (for example https://app.www.collabito.com/12345/ ).  If you attach the respondent’s code at the end of the URL, the respondent will be automatically logged in to the project after clicking the link (https://app.www.collabito.com/12345/code123456…2154/ ).

New project

2. Add pages

A page represents one activity or a task. It has its own item in the respondent’s Activity menu. You can combine different types of activities in the same project – for example, a welcome text page, text chat, several daily diaries, and a final video session at the end of the study.

Page types (modules):

  • Video chat: a video focus group with moderator and respondents using webcams
  • Text chat: a text-based chat room between moderator and respondents
  • Diary/blog: participants complete tasks – submit opinions, experience, add photos, etc. 
  • Bulletin board: common thread-styled discussion board
  • Questionnaire: respondents fill in questions in a form
  • Text page: used for introduction, thank-you pages or other information

Page properties

Each page has its custom setting where many attributes can be adjusted.

  • Page title: the name displayed in the Activity menu.
  • Status: active, closed, auto-activation by date or completion of other tasks.
  • Visibility in the menu: you can adjust whether respondents can see the page in the Activity menu or not.
  • Visible for groups – you can split respondents into different groups and show them different tasks.
  • Page intro texts: her comes the task text or question that will respondents see on the top of the page.
  • Section – you can split activities into various groups (by days, topics, etc.).
  • Some page types has specific settings (moderator’s guide, media upload, etc.
Focus group pages

3. Add participants (respondents)

Add respondents manually or use the bulk import.

  • E-mail
  • Display name (visible in chats, blogs), usually only first names or nicknames.
  • Name: visible only in your agenda to identify the correct respondents. You can use full names.
  • Phone, gender, and other optional details.
  • You can upload avatars to respondents, or they can upload their profile photos.
  • Group – respondents can be assigned to groups.
  • Status – active means that the respondent can join the study. You can deactivate any participant so he cannot enter the project.
  • The system generates an invitation link with a unique code for every respondent.

Add moderators, clients, visitors

The account owner is also a moderator by default, no need to add him/her again to the list of moderators. Of course, you can add other people as moderators, too. Moderators are defined on the project level – they can see only assigned project, not all your projects (unlike the account owner or team members).

You can invite a client to observe the study.  Moderators can communicate with the client during the live chat in the secondary chat window. Visitors can only watch the project.

Invite respondents

Inform your respondents when your projects starts and send them their unique link to your project.

Collabito can send the emails for you:

  • Go to Emails (in the project menu)
  • Add new campaign
  • Select recipients and click the Create campaign button.
  • Set up the email. Use the the automation tag {url_project_login} in the text and Collabito will replace it with the correct URL and password for each recipient automatically.

Please note that if you send emails and use your address as a sender, some email systems can flag these emails as spam. Don’t forget to test it before you send the bulk email to respondents.

Quick tutorial – Project setup

Quick tutorial – Project setup