Bring your own participants

If you already know who you want to talk to (customers, prospects, employees, partners), you don't need a panel. You bring them in via a share link or a CSV upload.

Before you start

You'll need:

• A list of people to invite, or a place to share the link.
• Optionally, a published screener: add one to qualify people before they interview; skip it for a known list (your own customers, say) you don't need to screen.

Steps

1. Generate a share link

   Click Share in the study header. Strella creates a share link participants can click. By default, the link does everything in one sitting (screener, qualification, and interview) with nothing for the participant to schedule.

   See Manage share links & redirects for multiple links and per-link customization.

2. Send it out

   Drop the link into an email, a calendar invite, a slack message, a "feedback" page on your site, wherever your audience is.

3. (Or) import a list via CSV

   In Recruit → Participants, open the three-dot menu and choose Import CSV, then select Add new participants. The other option, Update existing participants, only adds custom data to people already in your study.

   Include a name column and an email column. On the mapping step, confirm the email column maps to Email Address. Strella invites people by email, so you can't invite an imported person without one from the Participants table. Send that person the share link yourself, and mark an ID column as the participant identifier so their click joins the row you imported. Other columns become participant metadata that you can filter and tag on.

4. (Optional) Auto-invite qualified participants

   In Recruit → Audiences, open the share link's row or choose Manage share link from its menu, then turn on Auto-invite qualified participants for that link. Strella can then invite qualified participants who arrive through that link automatically, within remaining audience capacity and quotas. This suits high-trust audiences, such as your own customers.

   Leave it off for unknown lists if you want to vet each candidate first.

As people click your link (or you import them), they appear in Participants. The tabs along the top are Qualified, Invited, Completed, and Disqualified.

Tips

• If you use a screener, it's the gatekeeper. Even for a known list, the screener still runs: set quotas and qualification logic so an unknown contact in your CSV doesn't slip through. (No screener? Everyone who joins goes straight through.)
• For internal studies, use custom share links per audience (one for customers, one for employees, etc.) so you can tell who came from where.
• CSV imports don't send anything automatically. The imported people wait in Qualified until you invite them there, which emails them, or until you send them the share link yourself.

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