Safety & privacy for communicating with participants
There are two key ways participants can be exposed to individual researcher or research operations emails and names:
Email Privacy
For all emails that Ethnio sends (Pool, Scheduling, and Incentives), you can enter any email address or name at your organization's domain, so participants can't contact or harass researchers or research operations team members:
Please note that if you use an email outside your domain (e.g., acme.com), it will break DKIM if DKIM is enabled on your Enterprise plan.
Integration Privacy using Google and Zoom
It gets a little trickier to safeguard your identity if you're using the Google Calendar or Zoom integrations in Ethnio, but a popular approach is to create several individual email addresses at your organization to use for the integrations:
- Create multiple generic emails like research1@acme.com, research2@acme.com, etc., as individual Google Accounts, and use those to connect with Ethnio. You can't use aliases or Google Groups for this because of Google's security model.
- Similarly, create Zoom accounts with those same emails so Ethnio can create dynamic Zoom meetings.
- Add your own email as a collaborator to receive calendar invites for confirmed participants directly on your calendar. Alternatively, you can enable Google Calendar sharing for any of these emails with other Google accounts at your organization, but that's a fancier version of collaborator events and may not be necessary.
Standalone Gmail addresses
You can also use any generic Gmail address like acme_research@gmail.com, because DKIM doesn't govern calendar invites or Zoom meetings. With integrations, it's Google or Zoom that communicates with your participants, not Ethnio. You're basically just permitting Ethnio to have those tools send emails or events directly.
Be aware that scheduling emails are saved by team member
One gotcha: each team member can have their own sender identity on the same study. For example, you could send scheduling invites as Mary (mary@acme.com). Then Jane logs in to the same study and invites a participant, and by default the sender identity will be Jane (jane@acme.com).
This lets multiple team members invite participants on the same project or study and keep their own identities. If you'd rather have all invites come from the same sender identity, that's fine: just make sure your team members check that it matches when they log in. In this case, Jane would need to edit the From/Reply-To to say Mary (mary@acme.com).
This doesn't apply to Pool, because it sits on top of all studies and saves sender identity per distribution or automation.