Most survey links are anonymous by default.
That is fine for open feedback, website widgets, and public research. But it breaks down when 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 for customers, you need to know who ignored it. If you are recruiting a research panel, you need to follow up with the right people.
That is why we built Survey Invites.
<!-- Image: Survey Invites table showing pending, opened, and completed states -->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 cannot always see who opened the survey, who completed it, who needs a reminder, or how long it took someone to respond.
For anonymous research, that is a feature.
For targeted outreach, it is a problem.
What Survey Invites does
Survey Invites lets organization teams send personalized survey links by email.
Each invite has its own token. That means Formaly can track the invite lifecycle:
- Sent
- Opened
- Completed
- Follow-up sent
The important part is that status only moves forward. A completed invite does not get downgraded because someone clicks the link again later.
Why this matters
I built this because follow-up is where a lot of survey work becomes messy.
Teams send a link, wait, check responses, manually compare lists, send reminders, worry about duplicate emails, and still do not know exactly 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.
Guardrails we added
There are a few product details that matter:
- Duplicate invites are skipped instead of double-sent.
- Batch sending has a limit so people do not accidentally blast huge lists.
- Follow-up reminders are sent once, not repeatedly.
- Invites are scoped to organization surveys.
- The invite token is unique per recipient.
None of these details are flashy. They just make the feature safer to use.
When to use invites
Use 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. For that, a regular public link or embed is better.
What I am optimizing for
Survey distribution is part of survey quality.
It is not enough to write good questions. You also need to ask the right people, track the outreach cleanly, and follow up without being annoying.
Survey Invites is a small step toward making Formaly better for teams that run structured feedback programs, not just one-off forms.