---
url: "https://questionstar.com/blog/finding-survey-respondents/"
title: "Finding respondents for online surveys — routes that work"
description: "Social media, panels, universities, associations — all the places where respondents for your online survey are waiting. From 22 years of research practice."
lastmod: "2026-07-08"
type: "blog"
---

# Where do I find respondents for my survey

*Which route to respondents fits my question and my budget?*

There isn't one right way. There are several — and which one fits depends on your question and your budget.

*The questionnaire is ready, you've found the tool for online surveys, the survey has started and is ready to collect data. Now what? Where do I get the respondents..?*

![Young woman working with focus on a laptop in a café](/api/media/file/brooke-cagle-195777-unsplash.jpg)

*Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash*

*These are questions every student working on an empirical project asks themselves. Unfortunately, recruiting respondents turns out to be harder than expected for most seminar papers, bachelor's and master's theses. With this article I'd like to help you find respondents for your survey projects and thus contribute to the success of your academic work. Below I name and explain some important sources for recruiting respondents.*

[Social media](#social-media)

[Personal contact network](#persoenliches-kontektnetzwerk)
[Facebook groups of your university](#facebook-gruppen-ihrer-hochschule)
[Groups for recruiting respondents](#gruppen-fuer-probandenakquise)

[Respondent exchanges](#probandenboersen)
[Your supervisor](#ihr-betreuer)
[Panel providers](#panelanbieter)

### Social media

Posting the link to the online questionnaire on social media is probably the first idea that comes to a survey creator's mind. And indeed it's probably the fastest way to win respondents for online surveys. There are many ways to recruit respondents via social media. For students, however, the following three are particularly well suited:

[*Personal contact network*](#persoenliches-kontektnetzwerk)
[*Facebook groups of your university*](#facebook-gruppen-ihrer-hochschule)
[*Groups for recruiting respondents*](#gruppen-fuer-probandenakquise)

These three options are explained in more detail below.

### ***Personal contact network***

Posting on social media lets you tap above all the potential of your personal contact network. A post on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, X or LinkedIn is enough to reach all the contacts you have on the respective social media platform. What's more, friends and personal contacts are far more willing to support you at this important moment in your life — while you're writing your qualification thesis — and take part in your online survey than anyone else ever will be.

So make use of your personal relationships and post your request to take part in your online survey on all the social media platforms where you're registered.

To make this request work better, emphasize in your post that your friends' participation in the survey is personally important to you and that you'd be very grateful for it — according to social research, these arguments demonstrably increase willingness to help and thus raise the participation rate.

Also say that you'd be very grateful if people shared your post (this is important, because without the request to share, few people come up with the idea on their own).

Don't forget to include the link to your online questionnaire in the post (such embarrassing mistakes are not uncommon).

### ***Facebook groups of your university***

Another way to find survey respondents is through your university's Facebook groups.

These days every university or university of applied sciences, every faculty and field of study, as well as many individual subjects, has its own Facebook group. Today the same increasingly holds on WhatsApp, Discord and Instagram — the approach below works the same way wherever your fellow students gather. Although these groups mainly serve for students to exchange ideas about relevant topics of their university life (e.g. discussing exercise and exam problems, renting out a room in a shared flat, notices about things left behind in a lecture hall, etc.), they can indeed also be used to recruit survey respondents for academic projects.

Your fellow students are usually not as helpful as your friends are, but they know that many of them face a similar need to find respondents, and so they fill out your questionnaire — in the hope that when the time comes someone will fill out theirs too.

Moreover, such groups usually have many members — the number of group participants is mostly several hundred to several thousand. If we assume the response rate of 3% to 10% typical for online surveys, we can even estimate in advance the expected number of participants from posts in such groups.

So if you haven't done so already, search Facebook for your university's groups and join them. The search queries could be, for example, "TU München", "Psychologie Uni Göttingen", "BWL FH Hannover", "Master Medienwissenschaften Weimar", "Marketing Uni Siegen" and the like. If you didn't find anything, just try a different combination of university, field-of-study and subject names — you'll definitely find something.

Then post your call for survey participation in these groups and wait. As a rule, most respondents come in the first three days after the post. After that it's over, or rather you can't expect much response afterward.

*Trick to increase response:*

In particularly active groups the problem is that, due to the many posts, your post quickly slips down in the group newsfeed. This reduces the reach of the post — many group members don't even get to see it and therefore can't respond to your call.

In such cases you can use the following trick: as soon as you notice that your post has slipped too far down in the group, write something in the comments to your post (e.g. "up"). This brings the post back up — to the top of the newsfeed. To hide the manipulation from others, just delete the comment again. The post stays up.

**Takeaway:** By posting your call to take part in your online survey in your university's Facebook groups you can — depending on the size of the groups — win dozens to hundreds of respondents for your online survey.

**Warning:** You might quickly get the idea to post your call for survey participation in the Facebook groups of other universities. But there's a high probability that the moderators of these groups will report your post as SPAM and Facebook will deactivate your user account for a while. In the worst case your user account can be deleted forever. So be careful when posting in groups you don't belong to. It's best to clear this in advance with the group moderator.

### ***Groups for recruiting respondents***

In the spirit of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", groups have emerged on social media that are set up specifically for recruiting respondents, i.e. finding survey participants for student surveys.

In other words, the purpose of these groups lies solely in the mutual support of survey creators: whoever posts their call for survey participation in such a group can expect a good response. In return, you have the moral obligation to support other group members by taking part in their surveys yourself.

So join these groups and post your call for survey participation there.

Here comes the list of groups where you have a good chance of recruiting many respondents — sorted in descending order of number of members (the higher the number of members, the higher the response rate).

[Reddit r/SampleSize](https://www.reddit.com/r/SampleSize/) (English-language — the largest community of this kind)
[Umfragen für Studienarbeiten](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1438198899793916/)(7,500 members\*)
[Umfragen](https://www.facebook.com/groups/128449377315907/)(4,400 members\*)
[Studien suchen Teilnehmer -Studienteilnehmer gesucht & gefunden (+Umfragen)](https://www.facebook.com/groups/studiensuchenteilnehmer/)(2,000 members\*)
[Umrfagen Surveys](https://www.facebook.com/groups/466721536752382/)(1,500 members\*)
[Umfragen & Online-Experimente – Teilnehmer für empirische Studien finden](https://www.facebook.com/groups/studie.umfrage.posten.probanden.teilnehmer.finden/)(1,400 members\*)
[Umfragen & Umfrageteilnehmer finden](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1607738379538908/)(1,300 members\*)
[UMFRAGEN - Studienarbeiten - Meinungsforschung](https://www.facebook.com/groups/Studienarbeit.Umfragen/)(930 members\*)
[Probanden gesucht](https://www.facebook.com/groups/195042910588085/)(840 members\*)
[Probandenbörse für wissenschaftliche Studien an Hochschulen (Versuchspersonen / Probanden / Studienteilnehmer)](https://www.xing.com/communities/groups/probandenboerse-fuer-wissenschaftliche-studien-an-hochschulen-versuchspersonen-slash-probanden-slash-2689-1079529 )(490 members\*)
[Umfragen für Wiwi-Arbeiten von Studenten + Doktoranden](https://www.facebook.com/groups/434643516578194/) (320 members\*)

**Takeaway:** For English-language surveys, Reddit's r/SampleSize is the largest community of this kind; for German-language surveys, the most active groups are on Facebook.

**By the way:** if you use [QUESTIONSTAR](/) to create your survey, you can publish your online survey to social media directly from the tool.

### Respondent exchanges

A relatively new phenomenon in the area of recruiting respondents are "respondent exchanges". These are platforms that work similarly to the groups for recruiting respondents mentioned above: you register on the platform, publish the link to your online survey there, and in return take part in the surveys of other platform members.

Unlike Facebook groups, these platforms offer the ability to track participation in other platform members' surveys. For taking part in other platform members' surveys you get points. You can use these points to recruit participants for your own surveys. The more of others' surveys you support, the higher the response you can expect for your own surveys.

There are no costs on such platforms — at least for students and doctoral candidates. That's why it's worth taking a look at these platforms when searching for survey participants:

[Pollpool](https://www.poll-pool.com/)
[Thesius](https://www.thesius.de/umfragen)
[SurveyCircle](https://www.surveycircle.com/)
[SurveySwap](https://surveyswap.io/)

**Takeaway:** If you couldn't win enough respondents via social media, try the "respondent exchanges". These can potentially bring you many (dozens to hundreds of) survey participants.

### Your supervisor

The supervisor of your seminar paper, bachelor's or master's thesis usually has a wide reach and can draw the attention of attendees of their lectures and seminars to your survey. With some instructors, taking part in (online) surveys is even mandatory.

That's why you should definitely ask your supervisor whether they can promote your survey among their students. Asking costs nothing. You can't lose anything — in the worst case you stay right where you already are. But in the best case you can win hundreds of additional respondents.

What exactly can your supervisor do to recruit respondents for your online survey? Basically they don't need to do more than spread the link to your survey or the corresponding QR code among their students. To do this they can post the link and/or the QR code

– in the appropriate section of their website,
– show it in their lectures and seminars,
– spread it via the email distribution list,
– post it in their Facebook group if applicable.

One more route runs through your department itself: many departments — psychology especially — maintain a participant pool, often on a system like [SONA](https://www.sona-systems.com/), where students take part in studies for course credit. If yours has one, ask your supervisor whether you may list your survey there.

### Panel providers

Of course there are situations in which the tips listed above for recruiting respondents don't lead to the desired result — e.g. when you need to have people with certain demographic characteristics in your sample whom you can't reach via the "usual" channels.

In such cases you can turn to so-called panel providers. These providers specialize in managing and maintaining a large number of respondents (some panels contain several hundred thousand respondents). In their large databases you can find respondents with very specific characteristics in the required numbers.

These respondents — strictly speaking, the completion of the questionnaire by the respondents — can be bought from panel operators. The more specific the respondents' characteristics, the more expensive a respondent is; the more respondents you need, the cheaper a survey participant is. The exact prices are mostly negotiated individually for each survey project, and there's relatively a lot of room for haggling. How high the amount to be paid will be in the end is up to your negotiating skill. Depending on the particulars and size of the sample, the costs are typically a few euros per completed response, and can rise to €30 or more for hard-to-reach or specialist groups.

Most likely you won't need panel providers during your studies, unless your supervisor places great importance on data quality and provides you with a budget for recruiting respondents. That in itself is a sign of the high importance of your work and your supervisor's strong confidence in your performance.

The list of providers that can offer German-speaking online survey participants at affordable prices is relatively short:

[Prolific](https://www.prolific.com/)
[Dynata (formerly Research Now / SSI)](https://www.dynata.com/)
[Bilendi & respondi](https://www.bilendi.com/)
[Toluna](https://de.toluna.com/#/)
[YouGov](https://yougov.de/)

You'll find a longer list of companies operating in Germany that offer respondent panels on the [website of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Online-Forschung e.V.](https://www.dgof.de/mitglieder/korporative-mitglieder/).

### What next? Analysis and reports

After you've collected the data, you need to analyze it statistically, prepare the results in the form of tables and charts, and integrate them into your academic work.

Statistical software packages like [SPSS](https://jasp-stats.org/), [STATA](http://www.stata.com/), [SAS](http://www.sas.com/), MS Excel, [JASP](https://jasp-stats.org/), [jamovi](https://www.jamovi.org/), [PSPP](https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/) or [R](https://www.r-project.org/) (these four are free) will help you with this. You upload your collected data into your favorite program, run your analyses there, and create the necessary charts and tables in the process.

In most cases, however, you can save yourself these steps if you run your online survey with [QUESTIONSTAR](/). Data analysis, creating charts, tables and graphics is namely part of this tool. In other words, **with [QUESTIONSTAR](/) you don't need any additional analysis software.** Charts, tables and graphics can be exported to all common Office applications. You only need to transfer them into the text of your work by copy-and-paste. Better still: the graphics and charts are exported in the native Office format, so they keep the connection to the underlying data. That means you can not only adjust the appearance of charts and graphics, but also edit the data underlying them if needed — all without leaving Word or Powerpoint.

*The last paragraph was of course undisguised advertising for [QUESTIONSTAR](/). But honestly: aren't these great benefits and useful features?!* ;-)

### Closing words

I hope that with this article I've been able to give you useful tips that will help you in your search for respondents for your online surveys.

I wish you great success with your academic work!

Dr. Paul Marx

Date: 09/24/2018
Author: Dr. Paul Marx
Dr. Paul Marx is the founder and Managing Director of QUESTIONSTAR, with a background in academic marketing research, including a professorship at the University of Siegen.

## Related articles

- [sample-size-calculator](/blog/sample-size-calculator)
- [calculating-sample-size](/blog/calculating-sample-size)
- [data-protection-in-online-surveys](/blog/data-protection-in-online-surveys)

*Author: Dr. Paul Marx — see [About](/about).*