Recruit your own participants with a link, a CSV or your panel

A software company wants to hear from thirty of its own customers, the account owners who decide whether to renew. No panel holds that list. The team does, in a CRM export, next to a brand community and a recruitment agency it trusts for the hardest cases. Self-recruited panels bring those people into a Conveo study with no panel provider in between: you source the participants, Conveo runs the video conversations and the analysis.

Self-recruited panels, how they work and what they change, no sound needed.

How it works

Add a self-recruited panel from the Recruit tab of your study. There are three ways to fill it.

• Share one link. Generate an invite link and place it in a newsletter, an email, a community post or a QR code. Set a panel limit if admission should stop at a number, and turn on email collection if you need contact details.

• Upload a CSV. Put email addresses in the first column, plus any routing or participant properties your study uses. Conveo creates a unique link for each person. Send invitations and reminders from Conveo in any of the study's languages, or download the links and send them yourself.

• Connect your own panel provider. Share the invitation link with the provider. It carries placeholders for the participant ID and the completion URL, which the provider fills in on their side.

Launch the panel before you invite anyone; creating it does not open it. Screener questions and quotas apply to these participants as they do to panel recruits.

Research teams asked for it in five situations

These come from teams we work with in financial services, consumer electronics, B2B software, food and drink, retail and fashion, and research agencies. We kept them anonymous.

• Your own customers. Teams with a customer list in their CRM asked to interview those people instead of a lookalike panel sample.

• Hard-to-reach B2B roles. Teams whose audience is fleet managers, IT buyers or senior decision makers asked to bring their own contacts, because panels run thin there.

• A brand community or in-house panel. Companies that already run a consumer lounge, a tester pool or an applicant base asked to send those people a link.

• Recruiters and agencies passing the link on. Agencies with their own panel, or a recruiter they trust, asked to place the Conveo link at the end of their own screener or hand it over once people are found.

• One link per person. Teams that email invitations themselves asked for individual links, so they can see who has started, remind the rest and match answers to their own records.

Self-recruitment starts from people you already have. For audiences you still need to find, the integrated and partner panels sit in the same Recruit tab, and a study can combine both.

What this means for your research

Your customers, your community and agency-recruited participants join the same video conversation as panel participants, and their answers land in the same analysis. Invitations, reminders and the match between a person and their interview happen inside the study, so there is no spreadsheet to reconcile afterwards.

Two limits to know. You carry recruitment yourself: response rates, timing and any incentive are yours to manage, and Conveo does not source people for a self-recruited panel. And a CSV panel has no panel-level participant limit, so use the study response limit to cap completions.

Read the recruiting participants guide, Option D, for step-by-step setup of each route.