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Adding & Removing Participants (EX)

Qtip: This page describes functionality available to Engagement, Lifecycle, Pulse, and Ad Hoc Employee Research projects. However, only Engagement projects have hierarchies. For more details on each, see Types of Employee Experience Projects.

About Adding & Removing Participants

You can add participants for your Employee Engagement or Lifecycle project in the Participants section of the Participants tab. You can add these participants in large batches with a CSV/TSV made in Excel, or you can manually enter in information for just a few at a time. During this process, you can also include additional information called metadata for your participants that will later help you build hierarchies (EE) and organize data on your dashboards.

Qtip: There are two more options that may appear under your Add Participants button, depending on the type of project you have created.

If you are editing an Employee Engagement project, you also have the option of importing participants from the global directory.
If you are editing a Lifecycle project, you also have the option of setting up a participant import automation.

There is a feature button that will import users as non-SSO even if you have SSO implemented. This option will be toggled on by default, meaning participants will be added or imported as SSO users. You can disable this feature to import participants as non-SSO users, even if your license is SSO-enabled. This applies to participants added via import and manually.

Qtip: Employee Insights Admins and EX Administrators can import Brand Administrators as project participants. However, they cannot edit any Brand Admin user data, which can only be changed by other Brand Admins. This is to prevent user account admin information from being modified by lower level user admins. If you’d like to change this behavior, Brand Admins can reach out to XM Success Managers and ask to have the Limit EX Admin Update Person permission disabled for the organization.

Manually Adding Participants

Navigate to the Participants section of the Participants tab.
Click Add participants on the top-right.
Select Manually add participants.
Use the search bar to find users already uploaded into your employee directory. Select the user to add them to the list.

Qtip: If your license has SSO, make sure you upload your participants to the directory with their usernames before you upload participants! Once they’re in the directory, you can upload participants and exclude their usernames, so long as you have their unique identifiers.
Enter information for the participants you want to upload in the Unique identifier, Email, First name, and Last name fields.
Click Add metadata for each additional metadata field you’d like to add to the participant. For example, this can be useful for adding the participant’s language or the location where they work.
Qtip: You’re allowed to add as many metadata as you want, and you can make the titles to whatever you want. Note that a language field can only be called “Language.”
Click Add participant when you’re done adding details.
Repeat steps 4-7 for each participant you want to add.
When you’re finished entering participants, click Save.

Qtip: Metadata edits made in the Employee Directory only apply to the directory; metadata edits made to the project only apply to the project. The only exception is if edits are made to UserName or Unique Identifier – this information will be updated across the platform.

Qtip: If adding special characters, you must place the entire field in quotes.

Importing Participants with a File

Qtip: If your license has SSO, make sure you upload your participants to the directory with their UserName before you upload participants! Once they’re in the directory, you can upload participants and exclude the UserName column, so long as you have their unique identifiers.

Navigate to the Participants section of the Participants tab.
Click Add Participants on the top-right.
Select Import Participants.
Download the example CSV or TSV file. These are both spreadsheet files that can be opened in Excel and other similar programs.

Qtip: We recommend the TSV file if any of your fields, such as names of participants, contain characters other than numbers or the English alphabet.

Attention: If you use comma delimiters to separate multiple values in a metadata field, you will not be able to use Participation Summary Widgets that filter by that field.
Add participants to your spreadsheet, with one row for each participant (each participant must have an entry in the UniqueIdentifier, Email, FirstName, and LastName columns, though other columns may have blank cells). See our Preparing Your Participant File for Import support page for more information on what information to include in order to build hierarchies.

Qtip: The participant username will by default be the same value in the Email column. If you’d like to specify a different username for your participants, add a column titled UserName and specify a username. This username is what your participants will use to login to view dashboards.
Save the file as a UTF-8 encoded CSV (Comma Separated Values) or TSV (Tab Separated Values).
Qtip: The maximum file size for a contact list upload is 100 MB.
Click Select a file to browse your files.
If the importer detects initial issues, it will not let you proceed, and will list issues in red. Read these descriptions and make corrections to your file. After you’ve saved the changes, click Select a different file and re-upload the file.
If no issues are detected, click Check for Errors.
While the importer is loading, you can return to your participant list.
When loaded, the importer will summarize what participants will be updated or added to the project, and what impact this will have on your directory, too. The importer will also warn you if there are any errors in your rows.
If you are happy with these changes, click Finalize import.
You will be shown the status of your recent imports / exports.

Errors Detected

If you allow the importer to check for errors and some are detected, you will be given an error report you can download as a CSV, in case you have a large file that necessitates a large report.

Click Download Error Report to view this.

The report will give the exact row of the file that had the error, the field that had the issue, and the unique identifier of the participant who had the errors.

Example: We accidentally uploaded our user with the unique identifier “bp3835453” twice. Both the unique identifier and email address are the exact same on each of the two rows. If we erase one of the rows, the issue will be resolved when we go back to upload the file.

Qtip: The person importer does not detect hierarchy-specific issues.

Common Errors to Watch Out For

Although this is not an exhaustive list, here are some general tips for building your file to help you avoid issues uploading participants:

Make sure the first row of the file has UniqueIdentifier, First Name, Last Name, and Email.
Your file headers should not contain any special characters – this includes characters that are not numbers or the English alphabet.
Qtip: This rule only applies to headers, not column values.
Headers cannot exceed 100 characters.
Your file headers should not use terms from existing Qualtrics fields:
- SID
- RID
- Auditable
- EndDate
- RecordedDate
- StartDate
- Status
- Points
Be careful not to include duplicates of the same row – no two participants should have the same unique identifier or email.
The file should not have more than 200 header fields.
The file should not have more headers than columns.
Make sure column values do not exceed 1000 characters.

Importing Participants from the Directory

One common way to balance how frequent a survey goes out with the “survey fatigue” respondents may feel being asked to complete the survey over and over is to only survey a filtered subset. For example, you can survey one region or business unit at a time, or survey a random sample of the employees. This can allow higher levels of the organization to get representative engagement feedback without surveying the same employees as often.

When you add participants to a project from the Employee Directory, you can choose to add a randomized sample, with or without filter criteria.

This feature is especially relevant if you use a People Import Automation to regularly curate your employee directory.

Qtip: Do you send out Engagement surveys in the style of a “pulse” program? This functionality is perfect for you!

Go to the Participants tab of your project.
Click Add Participants.
Select Import from Global Directory.
Decide between importing all participants from the directory or participants who only meet the following criteria.

Qtip: If you choose to import all participants, skip Steps 5-7.
Choose a metadata value you’d like to filter the directory by.
Choose the value of this metadata you’d like to filter the directory by. You can choose multiple values.
Qtip: These values will be joined by “or;” for example, choosing France and Germany for country looks for employees with France or Germany listed as their country.

Qtip: If there are no options, that means no one in the directory has a value for that field. Remember, you can remove metadata fields from your directory, but should only do so if you are totally sure you don’t use these fields or plan to use them.
To add more criteria, click the dots and select Add condition below.
Qtip: Multiple criteria are joined by an “And” clause. For example, saying Country should be France and Department should be Finance means you’ll only import the Finance department members located in France.
Choose the percentage of participants you want to sample from the directory.
Qtip: When combined with a filter, this is the percentage of participants who meet the filter’s criteria. When not paired with a filter, this is the percentage of the entire global directory.
Click Import.

Updating Participants

Let’s say you already uploaded your participants, but realize you forgot to include some metadata. Maybe you accidentally uploaded the wrong values for your hierarchy, or you just want to add the location of each participant so you can add the option for your participants to filter their dashboard by the country their office is in. The good news is that you can upload another CSV/TSV file to update this metadata, so long as you follow the steps below.

Importing an Updated File

Follow the instructions on the Importing Participants section of this page to learn where to get an example file, and then upload it to your employee project. Remember to always include a Unique Identifier column so Qualtrics knows which participants to update. You may exclude participants and metadata columns you don’t want to change.

Qtip: This method can be used to edit, add, and remove metadata values. Uploading a file with empty values for a metadata field will erase participants’ current metadata values. (For example, this can help in instances where you may’ve accidentally assigned too many level hierarchy columns to a participant and need to remove a few. By including these columns but leaving values blank, you indicate these levels are empty.) The importer will not skip any columns you include in the import, even if all the participants have a blank value for it.

Attention: The hierarchy will only update when you import a file containing every metadata in your hierarchy. For example, if you used Unique Identifier, Manager ID, Org Unit ID, and Org Unit Description to build your hierarchy, all 4 of these columns will need to be present in an import to trigger a change in your hierarchy. You will not need metadata unrelated to the hierarchy, such as Age or Tenure.

Qtip: If a participant is updated with a new value for Email, their username will also be updated to match the new email address. This will happen unless one of the following is true:

The participant’s username has been specified in a separate column titled UserName.
The participant’s username has been manually changed in the participant information window, Employee Directory, or Admin tab so that it no longer matches the email address.

Pushing Metadata Updates to Responses and Dashboards

Qtip: These methods only work for Ad Hoc Employee Research and Engagement projects. Lifecycle participants do not have these options. See more on EX Project Types.

If you have made changes to your participants’ information by importing new metadata or through the participant information window, you will want to make sure these updates are reflected in your dashboards and with your responses. There are several ways to update participant metadata, depending on the level of edits you have made:

You can update participants one at a time in the Participants tab, using the dropdown to the right of their name.

If you have updated only a few participants, you can update metadata by selecting people you want to update, clicking Bulk actions, then selecting Update responses with current metadata.

If you made many changes to many participants, you can update all metadata under Tools.

Warning: Changes made to a participant’s metadata in a project will not reflect in the employee directory, nor will it change the participant’s metadata in historical projects. Metadata changes are specific to the project in which the change is made.

Metadata

Warning: There are certain characters that metadata names and values cannot support, as well as other naming conventions to consider. Please see Maximum and Supported Characters for guidance.

When adding participants, your file must contain metadata. Metadata are variables containing information about your participants, such as employee identification number, role in the company, or start date. Metadata can be used to create your hierarchy in Employee Engagement or to filter data in your dashboards in both Employee Lifecycle and Engagement.

Qtip: Forgot to upload certain metadata before data collection? Check out our section on Updating Participants.

In an imported file, metadata is represented as a column of data. The header becomes the name of the variable in Qualtrics.

Example: Employee ID and Manager ID are metadata used in building parent-child hierarchies (EE). Let’s say that at my company, my employee number is 831 and my manager’s employee number is 909. When adding myself as a participant, my Employee ID column would say 831 and my Manager ID column would say 909.

Example: In your Employee Engagement or Lifecycle dashboard, you want to provide comparisons of data from all the different departments against a baseline performance of engagement. When you add your participants, you should include a Department column with each of your employees’ department information so that this information is saved to the project and you can generate these comparisons in your dashboard once the engagement data is collected.

Removing Participants

There are a couple different ways to remove participants. One is a manual approach where you select participants and remove them by pages of the Participants tab. The other is a convenient import process where you can upload a list of Unique IDs for the participants you’d like to remove.

Attention: When you remove a participant from a project, you will remove their response data from the project. This means it will no longer be available on corresponding dashboards. Only remove a participant if you are sure you want to lose this data or if you have confirmed that no response was collected.

Manual Removal

If desired, search to narrow down the participants you see.
Select users you’d like to remove.
Click the Bulk actions dropdown.
Select Remove selected participants.
Type “remove.”
Click Remove Participant(s).

Qtip: You can only delete users together if they are on the same page of the Participants tab. If you go to the next page, any selections you made on the previous page are deselected.

Bulk Removal Through Import

Make sure you do not have any participants selected.
Go to Bulk actions.
Select Remove participants.
Click Download to export a template CSV for import.
Enter the corresponding IDs in the Unique Identifier column. Save your file.
Qtip: If you’re not familiar with your participants’ unique IDs, you may want to export your participants list.
Click Choose file and select the file.
Click Remove participants.

You may remove up to 25,000 participants at one time with this method. If you need to remove more than 25,000 participants, you will need to perform multiple removals.