Welcome to the Recruitment Policy Options Tooling Reference Guide.
Here you can learn about the different recruitment policies available in Gorilla by exploring the list of available Recruitment Policies on the left.
The recruitment policy is Disabled by default when you create a new experiment. You are able to preview and edit your task but participants are not able to access it via any of the previous methods. Once you have completed your data collection on an experiment, or if you need to halt the experiment for any reason, returning the recruitment policy to 'Disabled' again will prevent any further access, regardless of the previous recruitment policy setting.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy provides a simple link (URL) that can be copied and pasted as necessary. Participants simply take part in your study by clicking the link. It could be posted to Facebook, Twitter or other social media channels, included on a poster, or sent out via email.
If you intend to distribute your link in a way that requires participants to retype it (such as on a leaflet or poster), you may want to use a service such as bitly to make your link shorter. You could also turn it into a QR code with a service such as with QR.io .
Simple links are easy to distribute but they are not personalised. The same person could click the link again and they will be processed as a different participant. For this reason, we don't recommend using it for longitudinal studies where you might be using Delay Nodes. However, if you do decide to use Simple Link with Delay Nodes, you must check Send Reminder and Reminder Form in the configuration settings of the Delay Node, or it will be impossible for your participants to return and complete your experiment! This will require collecting participants' email addresses, so make sure you have ethical clearance for this first.
Note: If the participant clicks on the link from within a mobile app, the experiment may open within the app, rather than in a full browser such as Safari or Chrome. If this occurs, participants may not be able to complete tasks. We strongly recommend you ask participants to copy and paste the link for use on mobiles, rather than clicking it.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data or use identifying participant IDs
This recruitment policy provides a link where participants have to log in using a text string as an ID. This text string is not controlled, so they can log in with anything. If anonymous recruitment is important for your study, ensure your participants do not choose an identifying text string, or use a different recruitment policy.
We often use this policy for testing by using names like Test1, Test2, TestN! We also use it for piloting on team members, with us each using our initials.
Similar to the 'Simple link,' the link can be distributed by any means. The additional benefit is the ability to identify participants later on, allow participants to resume where they left off.
Note: If the participant clicks on the link from within a mobile app, the experiment may open within the app, rather than in a full browser such as Safari or Chrome. If this occurs, participants may not be able to complete tasks. We strongly recommend you ask participants to copy and paste the link for use on mobiles, rather than clicking it.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data such as email addresses or use identifying participant IDs
This recruitment policy allows you to define a set of Public IDs to be used with participants who will log in using a generic link. The Supervised policy is intended for use in a case where participants may not have email addresses and/or the experiment will take place in an area you can control/supervise such as a classroom or lab. Similarly to Email Shot, Email ID, and the Pilot policies, participants would be able to log in and resume their experiment where they left it. If a participant shared their public ID with someone else, that person would be able to log in as them. However, using this method in a controlled area such as a classroom or lab limits the possibility that a user could utilise someone else's ID.
Resend Email Action: If you do decide to use this policy in an unsupervised area, you can send participants emails. From your participants screen (for participants you have uploaded emails for) you can select the 'resend email' from the Action-menu. This will send the participant an email reminder to take part in your experiment. You may also wish to use this action to encourage participants to continue with their experiment if they have not yet returned to complete it.
Note: You can add new participants to your experiment at any time: simply upload a new .csv, .xlsx, or .ods file with IDs you wish to add - these will be added to your list of IDs, without overwriting the existing ones. Once you have uploaded your IDs, the Status will show as Pending in your Participant tab. You must click Activate in the 'Activated' column (or Activate All on the top right) before your participants will be able to start your experiment. Once you have done this, the 'Status' and 'Activated' columns will show the participant as Activated until they start your experiment, as shown below:
Identifying Recruitment Policy
This is an identifying recruitment policy, as it requires participant email addresses
This recruitment policy allows you to define a list of email addresses and public IDs for participants. Unlike the Email ID policy (which uses a generic link), each email address receives a personalised link. This allows you to identify participants without them needing to log in with an ID, and prevents participants from repeating an experiment more than once. There is nothing to prevent the participant from sharing their unique URL with some else, though they will still only be able to complete the experiment once. Participants also have the option to complete part of the experiment and then continue later by using the URL again.
Resend Email Action: From your participants screen you can select the 'resend email' from the Action-menu. This will send the participant an email reminder to take part in your experiment. You may also wish to use this action to encourage participants to continue with their experiment if they have not yet returned to complete it.
Note: You can add new participants to your experiment at any time: simply upload a new .csv, .xlsx, or .ods file with email addresses and IDs you wish to add - these will be added to your list of emails and IDs, without overwriting the existing ones. Once you have uploaded your emails and IDs, the Status will show as Pending in your Participant tab. You must click Activate in the 'Activated' column (or Activate All on the top right) before your participants will be able to start your experiment. Once you have done this, the 'Status' and 'Activated' columns will show the participant as Activated until they start your experiment, as shown below:
You can customise the email you send to participants by selecting a Customise Recruitment Email from your Recruitment tab settings as shown below:
Fill in the Subject and Body boxes with customised information you wish to display to your participants.
Make sure you include the tag {{url}} in your email where you would like to place the recruitment link.
You can also add in the participants name (as it appears in your Participants tab) using the tag {{name}}.
Identifying Recruitment Policy
This is an identifying recruitment policy, as it requires participant email addresses
This recruitment policy allows you to define a list of email addresses for participants, and requires you to set up a unique public ID for each participant in advance. Unlike Email Shot (which generates a unique link) the email will contain a generic link to a login page where the participant must use their unique public ID. With the link and public ID, the participant would be able to log in again to resume an experiment at a later time. However, nothing prevents the participant from sharing their link and public ID with another person.
Resend Email Action: From your participants screen you can select the 'resend email' from the Action-menu. This will send the participant an email reminder to take part in your experiment. You may also wish to use this action to encourage participants to continue with their experiment if they have not yet returned to complete it.
Note: You can add new participants to your experiment at any time: simply upload a new .csv, .xlsx, or .ods file with email addresses and IDs you wish to add - these will be added to your list of emails and IDs, without overwriting the existing ones. Once you have uploaded your emails and IDs, the Status will show as Pending in your Participant tab. You must click Activate in the 'Activated' column (or Activate All on the top right) before your participants will be able to start your experiment. Once you have done this, the 'Status' and 'Activated' columns will show the participant as Activated until they start your experiment, as shown below:
You can customise the email you send to participants by selecting a Customise Recruitment Email from your Recruitment tab settings as shown below:
Fill in the Subject and Body boxes with customised information you wish to display to your participants.
Make sure you include the tag {{url}} in your email where you would like to place the recruitment link.
You can also add in the participants name (as it appears in your Participants tab) using the tag {{name}}.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data or your recruitment provider uses identifying participant IDs
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via a 3rd party company or organisations.
Please note that for some popular recruitment companies or tools, such as Prolific, Sona Systems and Amazon Mechanical Turk, there are specialised recruitment polices available (see the menu on the left).
Most participant recruitment organisations will assign each participant a unique ID of their own.
In order to use Gorilla, instruct your recruiter to send each participant to your unique URL, substituting their participant ID for the [PARTICIPANT_ID] field for each participant. Gorilla will use this ID for the participant's PublicID. Gorilla will assume that two participants with the same ID are the same person, and so if they log in again they will continue where they left off. Make sure your recruiter is sending each participant through with a unique ID! Otherwise all your data will be treated as if it came from the same participant.
Note: external links posted on Children Helping Science must be to a page hosted on a university website. You would therefore need to host a participant signup form on your university website, post this link on Children Helping Science, and then send your Gorilla study link to participants who completed the signup form.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Prolific.com
Use Case: Use this when you want to recruit your participants using Prolific.
You might want to consider encouraging your participants to click the 'Open Study in New Window' button on Prolific so that they get your study fullscreen.
We also recommend you read Prolific's Gorilla Integration Guide in addition to their general use documentation.
In Gorilla: On your experiments 'Recruitment' page make sure you have selected 'Prolific' as your recruitment policy.
In Gorilla: Copy the Gorilla Experiment URL provided.
In Prolific: Paste the Gorilla Experiment URL provided into the 'Study URL' field in Prolific. Gorilla automatically captures the Prolific 'Participant ID' and 'Session ID' and stores them in Gorilla as a participant's 'Participant Public ID' and 'Participant External Session ID' respectively. These will then be visible in your Gorilla metrics - you will need to 'Unblind' your data to view the public ID within your metrics.
In Gorilla: On your experiments Finish node(s), under Onward URL, enter your Prolific return URL.
Are you recruiting for a longitudinal/multi-part study on Prolific? You'll need to think about the Prolific/Gorilla integration in a slightly different way. In Gorilla, you run your study in one experiment tree using Redirect Nodes instead of Delay Nodes. However, each part of your study needs to be listed as a separate study on Prolific, whilst using the same Gorilla recruitment link for each one. Take advantage of Prolific's Custom Allowlist to only invite the participants who completed the first part back to the remaining sessions of your experiment. Take a look at our longitudinal/multi-part studies support page and Prolific's integration guide "How do I set up a longitudinal (multi-part) study on Gorilla and Prolific" for more information.
We are aware of an ongoing problem where the number of available tokens on Gorilla does not match with the number of available places on Prolific, which leads to a frustrating experience for both researchers and participants. We are actively working on a development solution.
Check your participants regularly!
Prolific allows participants to (1) manually drop out of a study as well as (2) automatically dropping out participants that take longer than a multiple of the average completion time. At the moment, these techniques are not replicated in Gorilla.
This can lead to a disconnect between your recruitment target in Gorilla and in Prolific. Gorilla may think that your experiment has reached its target and won't accept any more entries while Prolific, having registered several dropouts, attempts to send more participants to meet your recruitment target. This can lead to a frustrating experience for participants who will sign up to your study on Prolific but be unable to complete their submission. On Gorilla, they will see the following warning "Experiment not available. This experiment is currently full".
While we are actively developing a solution to this problem at Gorilla, we strongly recommend you use a combination of the following safeguards in the meantime:
Set your recruitment target in Gorilla to be greater than your target in Prolific - this will give you some flexibility in Gorilla to manage participants who start but do not complete your experiment. If your account allows, set it to be 'Unlimited'.
Set an Experiment Time Limit on your Experiment's Recruitment Page: this will allow Gorilla to free up spaces in your experiment by automatically rejecting any 'live' participants who take too long to finish your experiment. If you are certain of the length of your experiment or the maximum length you will tolerate a participant taking to finish your experiment, then set your Time limit to match this duration.
You may also manually reject participants from your experiment via the Participants tab, if you need to free up spaces more immediately.
Use Checkpoint Nodes in your Experiment Tree - these will allow you to accurately assess participant progress during the experiment and quickly recognise participants who have stopped or dropped out.
If you don't have enough tokens to increase your recruitment target any higher, you could stagger your recruitment on Prolific. If you have 100 places on Gorilla, start by recruiting 50 on Prolific. Then manage your participants on the Participants tab and reject any participants that have likely dropped out, or wait for the timelimit you've set on your experiment to pass. Afterwards, increase the places on your Prolific study by a little more each time so that fewer participants are competing for places at one time.
You can read more about managing attrition and recruitment numbers.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Sona Systems™ .
Use Case: Use this when you want to recruit your participants using Sona Systems™.
When set up correctly, by integrating your experiment with Sona Systems™, Sona will be able to automatically grant credit to your participants upon their completion of your Gorilla Experiment. This eliminates the need for researchers to manually grant credits.
If you need further information about connecting your experiment with Sona you can view the Sona Systems Support page .
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).
Use Case: Use this when you want to recruit your participants from MTurk.
Your participants will start in Gorilla, once they complete your experiment (by entering a Finish Node) they will then be shown their MTurk completion code.
To connect your Gorilla experiment to MTurk, simply use the Gorilla URL as the URL for your HIT.
Gorilla will automatically show your participants a unique completion code, which they can use to confirm that they have completed the HIT. These completion codes will be included in your data download, so you can check them to ensure that they match those submitted for your HITs
Sometimes you will not wish to show a participant a completion code, such as when you want to reject a participant.
A Reject Node can be used to end the experiment for that participant, and can show them a completion code.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Cloud Research (formerly TurkPrime).
Use Case: Use this when you want to recruit your participants from Cloud Research.
To connect your Gorilla experiment to Cloud Research, simply use the Gorilla URL as the URL for your HIT.
Gorilla will automatically show your participants a unique completion code, which they can use to confirm that they have completed the HIT. These completion codes will be included in your data download, so you can check them to ensure that they match those submitted for your HITs.
Sometimes you will not wish to show a participant a completion code, such as when you want to reject a participant.
A Reject Node can be used to end the experiment for that participant, and will not show them a completion code.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Qualtrics.
Use Case: Use this when you want to recruit your participants from Qualtrics or else link your qualtrics surveys with your Gorilla experiments.
Your participants will start in Qualtrics, and then be passed to Gorilla to complete the experiment. When set up correctly, a participant's 'Response ID' in Qualtrics will be identical to their PublicID in Gorilla. Allowing you to easily match up data from both systems.
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Qualtrics Panel .
Use Case: Use this recruitment policy when you want to recruit your participants from a Qualtrics Panel.
Your participants will need to start in Qualtrics, and then be passed to Gorilla to complete the experiment, before being passed back to the Qualtrics Panel again to flag that they have completed the experiment.
When set up correctly, a participant's 'Response ID' in Qualtrics will be identical to their PublicID in Gorilla. Allowing you to easily match up data from both systems.
Make sure all your Finish nodes redirect back to Qualtrics, otherwise Qualtrics has no way of knowing that they've finished!
Anonymous Recruitment Policy
This is an anonymous recruitment policy, unless you explicitly collect identifying data
This recruitment policy allows you to recruit participants via the 3rd party tool Kantar Profiles .
Use Case: Use this recruitment policy when you want to recruit your participants from Kantar Profiles.
To connect your Gorilla experiment to Kantar Profiles, simply use the Gorilla URL as the URL for your study.
Gorilla will automatically capture your participants' parameters and append them to any return URLs, allowing you to track if they have completed the study.
You want to reward your participants for taking part in your experiment, but you don't use a recruitment service that pays participants? Consider using a Reward Node, where you can send a voucher or a gift card to your participants and make sure to compensate them for the time and effort they put in when taking part in your research study.
There are a few reward platforms you could use to implement a reward. Have a look at their websites: