Once you've finalized your survey, you should be ready to set up respondent sources for it. To create a respondent source, click Add respondent source on the Summary tab. This will take you to the Add respondent source wizard:
Different kinds of respondent source
Respondent sources fall into a few kinds: integrated providers, first-party data, external providers, and sources that bring in responses you already have or generate synthetically:
- The platform automatically sources respondents from integrated providers.
- First-party data, available on the Team or Enterprise plans, are used to survey your customer base.
- External respondent sources can be used on the Team or Enterprise plans, allowing custom integration with your sample provider. We have a dedicated, pre-configured flow for InnovateMR, and you can connect any other panel using the generic bring your own sample flow.
- Third-party Import loads completed responses that were collected outside MX8 Labs so you can report on them alongside your other sources.
- Synthetic sources generate respondents rather than recruiting them — either Synthetic Twins trained on a previous survey, or Synthetic Profiles built from a prompt per respondent.
- You can also field by phone with a Twilio Voice or Twilio Text source.
Use a respondent source name in survey logic
Read s.respondent.source when survey logic needs to identify the respondent's source. It returns the source's display name when one was captured at launch and otherwise falls back to the technical source type:
from survey import Survey
s = Survey(**globals())
if s.respondent.source == "Customer panel":
s.show_message("Thanks for taking part in our customer study.")
The platform automatically adds a launch-time source name to reporting with the stable ID respondent_source and label Respondent source. Do not call s.store_value() just to make the source reportable.
For integrated providers, the respondent source definition will be taken from any quotas you have in the survey:
You can then edit the Demographic Targeting field to add additional targets available from the sample provider. Targeting is edited as structured JSON in a validating editor — describe the demographic quotas and targeting logic with a target percentage next to each value, and the editor will flag anything that isn't valid JSON before you can save:
Adding boost respondent sources
Sometimes, you might want to augment a specific survey with more respondents of a particular kind without skewing the overall results. To do this, you create a new respondent source with the required distribution and specify that it should be weighted to the main respondent source you have set up.
If you look at the example below, we have boosted the respondent source for African American respondents as follows:
- The respondent source definition specifies only African Americans and a lower percentage of Hispanics.
- The weighting respondent source is set to the primary respondent source, "US Genpop".
This will give us an additional 300 responses in the African American group, which will greatly increase the statistical significance of results within this group without impacting the overall distribution of results in the survey.
Reading live incidence rate while in field
Once a respondent source is live, the summary tab shows a live incidence rate (IR) for each source alongside the rest of the progress metrics. IR is calculated on the fly from respondents who have already entered the survey, so it reflects what is actually happening in field, not the estimate you used when pricing the study.
Hovering over the IR bar reveals the breakdown that makes up the number:
The breakdown separates four outcomes:
- Completed — respondents who finished the survey and passed quality checks. This is the numerator in the IR calculation.
- In progress — respondents who have entered the survey but not yet finished. A persistently high in-progress figure is usually a sign of a long survey or a confusing question.
- Terminated — respondents who were screened out by a termination question or a failed quality gate. This is normally the biggest driver of IR, and the one to watch when comparing sources.
- Poor quality — respondents flagged and removed by the fraud and quality systems. A spike here is a flag to investigate the source before continuing to spend.
Because IR is computed per source, you can quickly see whether a blended underperformance is caused by the audience as a whole or by a single source dragging the number down. If one source has a materially lower IR than the others, it is usually worth pausing or re-targeting that source rather than widening every source at once.
Live IR is recomputed as new respondents come in, so the number will move during the first few hundred completes. We would not recommend acting on the IR until a source has at least 50 to 100 entries, which is usually enough for the per-source figure to settle.
For a full breakdown of what is happening inside a source — where respondents are terminating, which devices are struggling, and how each demographic group is progressing — click the Report button next to the source to open the field report.
Voice and text dispatch progress
For Twilio Voice, Twilio Text, and Twilio Text-to-Caller sources, use the source's progress bar on the Summary tab to monitor delivery across the uploaded contact list. The bar groups destinations into these states:
- Planned — the destination is in the campaign but has not been queued yet.
- Scheduled — the destination has been queued for delivery.
- Starting — the platform has handed the attempt to Twilio and is waiting for a terminal provider update.
- Delivered — Twilio reported that the message or call reached its delivery milestone. For voice, answered, in-progress, and completed provider events map to this state.
- Failed — the attempt could not be delivered, for example because a call was busy or unanswered, or Twilio returned a delivery failure.
Do not treat Delivered as Complete. The progress bar describes what happened to the outbound message or call; the field report describes what the person did after entering the survey. A delivered destination can still be New, In Progress, Terminated, Poor Quality, or Complete.
To investigate an individual destination, open the source's field report and, if you have export permission, select Dispatch CSV. See Field reports.