Most survey links are anonymous by default.
That is fine for open feedback, website widgets, and public research. But it breaks down the moment you are trying to hear from specific people.
If you are asking ten design partners for feedback, you need to know who responded. If you are running an NPS program, you need to know who ignored it. If you are recruiting a research panel, you need to follow up with the right people, and only the right people.
That is why we built Survey Invites.
The problem with generic links
A generic survey link is easy to share, but it loses identity. You can see that responses came in; you usually cannot see who opened the survey, who completed it, who needs a reminder, or how long someone took.
For anonymous research, that anonymity is a feature. For targeted outreach, it is a problem, and the workaround (exporting responses, comparing against a contact list by hand, manually sending reminders) is exactly the kind of busywork that makes feedback programs decay.
What Survey Invites does
Survey Invites lets organization teams send personalized survey links by email. Each invite carries its own unique token, so Formaly can track the full lifecycle:
- Sent
- Opened
- Completed
- Follow-up sent
The important property is that status only moves forward. A completed invite does not get downgraded because someone clicks the link again later, so the dashboard always reflects the furthest state each person reached.
Why this matters
Follow-up is where survey work usually turns messy. Teams send a link, wait, check responses, manually reconcile lists, send reminders, worry about double-emailing someone, and still are not sure what happened.
Survey Invites makes that loop explicit. You can see who got the invite, who opened it, who completed it, and who still needs a nudge, in one table, scoped to the survey. Pair that with the completion-rate practices (one well-timed reminder helps; more starts to feel like pressure) and the outreach stays effective without becoming annoying.
Guardrails we built in
A few details that are not flashy but make the feature safe to use:
- Duplicate invites are skipped, not double-sent.
- Batch sending has a limit, so nobody accidentally blasts a huge list.
- Follow-up reminders send once, not repeatedly.
- Invites are scoped to organization surveys, with role-based access.
- Each invite token is unique per recipient, which is what makes the tracking trustworthy.
When to use invites
Reach for Survey Invites when the identity of the respondent matters:
- Customer advisory boards
- NPS outreach
- Design-partner feedback
- Research panels
- Churn interviews
- Beta-user surveys
Do not use it when you want anonymous, open-ended public feedback, a regular public link, website embed, or in-product SDK prompt is better for that.
What I am optimizing for
Survey distribution is part of survey quality. It is not enough to write good questions, you also have to ask the right people, track the outreach cleanly, and follow up without being a pest.
Survey Invites is a small step toward making Formaly better for teams running structured feedback programs, not just one-off forms.