How to gather consent, NDA's, and agreements from participants

Approach 1: Study link in the study editor

Consent can be managed via a study sign up link in two ways:

Using the study editor, drag a central consent form into the editor (this can save signed consent)

Approach 2: Consent during scheduling

If you want any participant that's scheduled for a moderated study to have to complete consent prior to confirming their time, follow these steps:

1. Set up your consent page by going to Home > Consent.

   Ethnio has a centralized consent module which allows you to:

   1. Integrate your DocuSign account with Ethnio and show PowerForms directly to participants during the scheduling confirmation flow
   2. Paste an Adobe Sign link to embed in the scheduling flow
   3. Build a consent form in Ethnio with checkboxes and signature block in our consent builder
2. Navigate to your study and go to Scheduling > Pages.
3. Toggle on “Require Consent from Participants”, which will allow you to select the consent page from the dropdown menu. You can also add multiple consent pages to the same study if needed.

Note: this requires participants to be invited to a session and provide consent before being confirmed for their session. Invite before confirming must be enabled from Scheduling > Quick Settings.

⚠️ Heads up: manually confirming a participant skips consent

Consent during Scheduling only appears when a participant is invited and confirms their session time themselves. If you manually confirm a participant, the consent step is skipped and they won't be asked to sign.

To make sure everyone sees the consent step, keep Invite before confirming enabled in Scheduling >> Quick Settings and let participants confirm their own times.

Already confirmed someone before they signed? 📝

You can still collect consent without making them sign up again. If a participant was manually confirmed before signing, there are two options.

Option 1: Turn on the consent reminder email and add your consent link to the email text. The participant can sign from that link without going through scheduling again.

Option 2: Set up a separate study using the new questions editor, add the Consent question type, and share that study link with the participant by email.

Once Invite before confirming is enabled, new participants who are invited to confirm sessions will see the consent step as part of the scheduling flow.

Approach 3: Add a simple question asking for a click

Add a formatted text block some language directing participants to the company’s legal terms and conditions or privacy statement.  E.g. “By taking part in this survey, you agree to the Acme.com Privacy Statement.”

This can also be part of a screener qualifying question, forcing participants to agree to the terms separately (with checkboxes or radio buttons etc). That way, only consenting participants will qualify as a valid response to be scheduled in Ethnio. For example:

This will only go to participants who you've selected to participate, and have confirmed. Most of our customers use DocuSign or something similar to generate a URL that the participants have to digitally sign/complete before the research session starts.

Approach 4) Double Opt In with Pool

With access to Pool (Enterprise-Only), you can setup an Automation to send an email immediately to each respondent that fills out a study link with consent. It can then include both a "double opt in" button to confirm they received the email as well as a link to any NDA or other online consent link (DocuSign, etc).