Link Any External Survey to a Fuel Cycle Activity through Alchemer Follow

Link any external study to your community so that your members can participate in your research. In this example, we use Alchemer as a pass-through for linking Fuel Cycle to your study to pass participant data, such as user ID, into their system.

There are a few things you will need for this process:

• If your external study has a participation link, you will need it so that this Alchemer page can direct you to it.
• If your external study has a place to add a redirect, you should add your Community's main page URL as the redirect. When members finish your external study, they will be redirected back to the Community's main page to "complete the loop" as it were.
• You will also need to Add the Fuel Cycle redirect URL on the last Thank You page so that the survey will link back to Fuel Cycle and the participant data will flow to Alchemer as they begin to participate in the study.

In your Alchemer survey tool...

1. Create an Alchemer survey. The first survey page should contain text that explains the process. When they are ready to proceed they can click Next.
   
2. The second page should consist of a URL redirect action that contains the study participation link.
   
3. Under Fields to Pass...
   • Under Question to Send, change the drop-down to URL variable and click Add Field.
   • Add the URL variable userid and under Variable Name add userid.
   • Click Save Action.
     
4. On the Edit Action Logic tab, change Disable Action to Yes (this is temporary).
5. Add the Fuel Cycle redirect URL on the last Thank You page back to Fuel Cycle so that the survey will link to Fuel Cycle and the participant data will flow to Alchemer as they begin to participate in the study.
   
   
6. On the Edit Action Logic tab, change Disable Action to No. This reverses the action in Step 4 and activates the redirect to the external study.
7. Return to the Fuel Cycle browser tab. You will notice that the page has changed to Create & Import Survey.
   
8. Add the survey link to Fuel Cycle. This links the survey you just created to Fuel Cycle and allows you to link participant data through the survey and to the external study. At the end of this process, you will successfully import the survey to Fuel Cycle.
9. Return to your Alchemer browser tab.
10. Edit the last Thank You page that contains the redirect back to Fuel Cycle

At this point, moderators can add the survey to an activity and share it with participants to join the study.