Deploy an External Study to your Community Follow

If you have a license to a tool not integrated with Fuel Cycle you may follow these steps to deploy a study to your Community:

1. Obtain a list of Fuel Cycle User IDs for all members who will be invited to the study. You can do this via Members > New Member Export. Each member’s User ID will appear under the first column of the resulting XLS file.
   
   (Optional) If you would like to restrict the export to a specific group, select the group under “Group Membership” on the New Member Export page, then mark the checkbox “Only include members in the group(s) selected.”
   
   
2. Obtain the participant link for your external study.
3. Use this templatized XLS file as a guide to create a unique link for each member.
4. Build your invitation email using Fuel Cycle’s email builder.

   IMPORTANT: In the “URL” field of your call-to-action button, enter ${UNIQUE_LINK}. This variable will be replaced with each member’s unique link when you send out the email.

   
5. Once you are finished building the email, continue to the Schedule page. Under Recipients, select User Distribution List.
   
6. Click the “Download Sample” link below that. Open the CSV file that will download. It will look like this:
   
7. Fill in the User IDs in Column A. In Column B, enter the header UNIQUE_LINK (be sure to match this verbatim, as if there are any differences between this and the ${UNIQUE_LINK} variable in the email, it will not pull correctly). Fill in each member’s corresponding Unique Link below that. Please make sure that the letter in the middle of the URL is a “q” and not any other letter—otherwise, the Fuel Cycle IDs will not pull through properly. Your resulting file should look something like this:
   

Create a separate CSV file using the same format shown above that contains ONLY your test member’s User ID and corresponding Unique Link. (For info on how to create a test member account, see here. Also be sure to register it under an email address that you have access to.) This is so that you can send yourself a test email before sending the email out to the full user distribution.

Follow steps 8-9 below to send yourself your test email (using the test CSV file you just created rather than the full user distribution).

Open the test email once you receive it in your inbox and check for grammar, formatting, etc. Be sure to click on the call-to-action button to ensure that the link successfully redirects you to your external study.

If everything looks okay and the link is working properly, return to the Fuel Cycle Communication Center. Copy the test email you just sent yourself, then send it out to the full User Distribution List.

8. Save your CSV file, return to the Schedule page, then click the Upload button under User Distribution List to upload the CSV file.
9. Schedule your email to send!

Check out our article on using custom variables in email campaigns for more information.