Recruiting Participants

Share links

Every study has a short participant link:

https://app.deutero.ai/chat?s=<your-slug>

• Short URL — edit the slug and click Update. Slugs are unique across all of Deutero, so you are told if one is taken.
• Copy Link copies the text chat URL.
• Voice Interview URL and Video Interview URL also appear when you enable those modalities on the Details page.

Known issue (September 2026). The Voice Interview URL shown here uses your short URL (/voice?s=your-slug), which the voice interviewer does not accept — participants get "No study specified — this link is missing its study_id." when they press Start interview. Share https://app.deutero.ai/voice?survey_id=<your study id> instead; that form works, and it is what Try Interview on the Questions page uses. Text and video links are unaffected.

There is also a direct form, useful for testing: https://app.deutero.ai/chat?survey_id=<study id> — this is what Try Interview opens.

Tagging a link

Any participant link takes two optional parameters, and both are recorded on the interview:

https://app.deutero.ai/chat?s=mealkit-churn&source=reddit
https://app.deutero.ai/chat?s=mealkit-churn&participant_id=panel-7781

Give each channel its own source and post that link there; build one link per person when you need the ID. Both appear on the transcript and can be filtered on in the interviews list, and both are in the CSV export.

Use a pseudonymous participant ID — a hash of your own user ID, a panel token, a row key. Never an email address or a name: the value sits in a URL the participant can read, in the interview record, in your exports, and on the completion redirect.

Anyone holding the link can edit either value, so treat them as labels, not as proof of who answered. If you need an identifier you can rely on, sign it into an embed token. For an embedded study there is no link to tag — put a participant_id key in the widget's metadata instead, and it is recorded the same way.

QR code

Generated from the participant link, with Copy and Download buttons. Good for posters, slides and in-person recruiting.

Tag this QR code puts a source on the encoded link. A scan carries no referrer, so a tag is the only thing that can tell one printing from another: give each poster, slide or handout its own (library-poster, conference-table), and the download is named after it. Leave it blank for a plain link.

Recruitment aids

• Suggest recruitment strategy — drafts a strategy, a social media post and an email template from your study details
• Recruitment Flyer — builds a printable flyer with the QR code, downloadable as PDF or SVG
• Snowball Sampling — after finishing, participants are invited to pass the study on. Turn it on, write (or generate) the message, and save.

Paid recruitment

Recruit with Prolific buys participants from Prolific's panel and pays them through Deutero. It has its own page: Prolific Recruitment.

Other channels

• Slack and Discord — post recruitment messages into channels on a schedule and run interviews there.
• Embed widget — run the interview inside your own site or app.

With MCP

get_recruitment    {"study_id": "…"}
update_recruitment {"study_id": "…", "short_url_slug": "mealkit-churn",
                    "max_responses": 50,
                    "redirect_url": "https://example.com/thanks"}

get_recruitment returns the participation links, quota status and the pre-interview gate flags (whether screening and characteristics are on). The links come back bare — append &source= and &participant_id= yourself. update_recruitment only changes the fields you pass; use clear_max_responses: true to remove a quota.

A redirect_url may contain {{external_participant_id}}, replaced at the end of the interview with the ID that interview arrived with — how a panel or CRM gets its own ID handed back:

update_recruitment {"study_id": "…",
                    "redirect_url": "https://panel.example/done?pid={{external_participant_id}}"}

Rewarding people who finish

The round trip, for a study that has to do something when an interview ends — credit an account, send a voucher, tick a panel task off:

1. Build the link with your own ID. …/chat?s=<slug>&participant_id=<hash of your user id>. For an embedded study, put the same value in the widget's participant_id metadata key.
2. Send them back identified. Set the Redirect URL to your own page with {{external_participant_id}} in it, and the screening redirect too if you screen people out. They land back on your site and you know who they are.
3. Act on the signed event, not the redirect. Subscribe to interview.completed, in Settings or with create_webhook over MCP. It carries external_participant_id next to the interview ID, signed, so the reward is issued by your server. A redirect is a URL the participant can replay; a webhook is not. (interview.started carries the same IDs if you want to mark an attempt as in progress.)
4. Reconcile if you ever miss one. find_interviews_by_external_id {"study_id": "…", "external_participant_id": "<hash>"} answers "did this person finish, and what happened?" directly — every attempt they made, newest first, in full detail. list_interviews takes the same filter if you only want the summary rows, and bulk_transcripts {"study_id": "…", "external_participant_id": "<hash>"} fetches what they actually said.

Because step 3 pays out on it, the ID must stay pseudonymous and unguessable enough that nobody can claim a reward by editing a link — a hash of your user ID with a secret salt, or a one-time token you issued, rather than a sequential number.

Strategy text, flyers, QR codes and snowball settings are dashboard-only.

Ethics

• Say who is running the study and what participation involves, before anyone starts.
• Do not describe the study as something other than what it is.
• Follow your institution's IRB or ethics process where one applies.
• Pay fairly when you pay at all — Prolific enforces a minimum, and Deutero shows a recommended rate.
• Give people a way to reach you; your researcher contact details come from your profile.

Last updated: September 2026