A powerful model for your panel
If your participants are organized into groups with multiple roles that matter to your organization, you might be doing a lot of work already juggling those roles. It could be your customers have managers, legal teams, or admin resources that you need to contact just to potentially recruit your ideal research participant.
Or maybe your participants are grouped into companies, families, or other types of organizations where you need to CC multiple members of the group with all your research communication.
This is one of the biggest challenges our customers face—how crazy complicated it can be to properly email, track, and pay groups for research.
Whether you're part of a high-growth product team, a government agency, or a Fortune 500 company, Ethnio already helps teams manage participant approvals and recruitment at scale so we get it.
Groups is designed to radically save time and headaches for you and your team gathering consent and permission from one member of a group, and then scheduling and paying another member of that same group for research. This can create on of the most complex recruitment chains. At its core, Ethnio Groups is a new data structure that lets you email, track, schedule, and pay groups of participants at scale while navigating through layers of permissions.
Let’s get into how this new structure simplifies a complicated process of properly emailing, tracking, and paying groups for research. Let’s get into it.
Panels vs Groups
Wait… aren’t Groups and Panels the same thing? A panel is a group of people. A group is a group of people. So what the $@f?
The key difference lies in the roles and properties.
Let’s start with any research where you have to go through admins to schedule research.
Imagine a hotel owner who is incredibly busy and does not manage their own schedule, but is willing to participate in research with your team. You need to coordinate with their admin first, but still schedule and compensate the hotel owner. You might create a group called “Hotels” and then setup these properties and roles:
This lets you have easy email shortcuts to email the admins for scheduling and logistics, but still get the actual interview scheduled and compensation sent to the hotel owner.
With Ethnio Groups, you can structure outreach to match real-world hierarchies.
Define the roles and relationships between all members involved, which allows you to better track and manage consent across multiple levels as you move through your recruitment funnel towards your potential participants.
✅ Admins approve outreach and grant permission first
✅ Hotel owners receive research invites at the right time
✅ Other roles like project managers can also tracks approvals and schedules seamlessly
Viola - now recruiting high-profile, hard-to-reach participants is much easier while maintaining a professional, organized workflow.
When to use Groups
Scenario 1: Recruitment with Multiple Stakeholders
If your research study requires multiple participants from the same organization (such as hotels, medical offices, or large enterprises), but those participants hold different roles (e.g., marketing directors, HR managers, and front desk managers), with Groups, you can engage each role at the right stage of your recruitment funnel.
Scenario 2: Navigating Gatekeepers
When you need to secure approval from legal teams, HR managers, or project managers before recruiting actual participants, Groups helps you track and manage these approvals at scale—keeping everything on track, without missing a step.
Coolest parts of groups
The ability to CC specific roles, track them by each group, and schedule and pay the people who participated in research -who may not have been the role you originally emailed about the study- is VERY unique to Ethnio.
No more bottlenecks to:
Group emailing - CCing the right people in the same group across many groups and many people. There are almost no tools in the world that let you email thousands of groups with multiple roles CC’d via large-scale email distributions.
Email personalization by group at massive scale - if you want the body of the email to reference the parents names of potential participants and also the teenagers names, that all NEEDS to be correct for every single group, emailed at the same time. Imagine if you have 3 customers: IBM, Coca Cola, and the IRS, and the email says “Hi {Marketing Coordinator} at {Coca Cola},” it would be bad if that said {IBM}.
Easily identify group members - meaning you can see for any participant, the groups they belong to, and see the relationships. Think “Medical offices” or “Customers” or “Companies” as the example. Email front desk manager with research invite, then assistant for schedule, then doctor with calendar invite and incentive payment.
Filtering on group roles or properties - if you want to see medical offices with >100 employees, then get doctors booked for research sessions that pay $1,000, and then use that filtered list to email the front desk managers first.
Import groups from a native Qualtrics integration, Google Sheets, CSV, XLSX, or via API.
Integrations with key tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, and Qualtrics. You can receive real-time alerts for screener responses in Slack, schedule video sessions via Zoom, and sync group schedules with your calendar, all while maintaining privacy compliance through GDPR and CCPA automation.
Metrics - any group properties are part of the customizable Ethnio reports.
Localization and international support - all group communication can be in any language and all incentives can be in any currency.
Groups in action
Let’s say you’re working with 1,000 hotels, each with a variety of decision-makers involved to successfully conduct a usability study for a new POS terminal. You're conducting independent research and testing of a POS system designed to optimize operations for these customers. Your goal? Determine whether this new POS terminal improves operational efficiency in hospitality settings.
You’ve got several moving parts to manage. A project manager isn't likely to reach Conrad Hilton of Hilton hotels. Or the COO. Or even the Hotel Operations Manager, who’s already balancing front desk operations, housekeeping, and guest services—all while keeping an eye on profitability.
So, who are you dealing with? (Spoiler alert: it’s a lot of people.)
Marketing Directors to sign off on the research study
HR Managers to grant scheduling permissions
Front Desk Managers need to be screened to participate in the research sessions and provide feedback on the POS terminal
That’s a lot to manage—multiple layers of approvals and participants. Keeping track of who gives the green light, who’s booked, and who’s ready to share insights can spiral into chaos fast. It can all become quite disorganized if not tracked properly.
This is where Ethnio Groups steps in. This is the sketch for how group communication can work in this study and how it all comes together:
Now imagine if your email workflow looked like this instead. That’s the power of Group Communication.
Sending study invites to different roles
Ok working back towards step one - how do you actually contact different hotel roles at scale?
The problem is you have to go through HR to get on their schedule, so you need your panel to contain HR Managers and Marketing Directors, but when you send out a research study invite, you want to contact the HR Managers first, then get their permission to schedule the directors.
You need to reach out to Marketing Directors to get the green light. But you can’t schedule anything until you’ve got approval from HR Managers—and even then, you’re not done. Once HR gives you the thumbs-up, it’s time to bring in the Front Desk Managers for the actual research session.
Oh and you really want to be confident that each Hotel contains the right group of marketing director + front desk managers. It would be pretty bad if those Hotels got mixed up.
You’re juggling multiple groups, coordinating emails manually, and constantly checking who’s cleared for what.
And since have to go through the Marketing Director to get on the schedule of the front desk manager, you need your panel to contain consent and authorization from the Marketing Director, but when you send out a research study invite, you want to contact the Front Desk Manager, schedule them, and pay them. Optionally, you can keep the Marketing Director in the loop by CCing them on those.
Now, you have a data structure that reflects your recruitment needs (and is even easier to set up)
You can segment your hotel participants into custom groups, each reflecting specific roles and permissions. And when it's time to send out invites, you don’t have to dig through spreadsheets or email lists to figure out who should get what communication.
With Ethnio Groups, you’ve got automated workflows that handle all this for you, from permissions tracking to email distribution. Each group you set up comes with built-in visibility and filters. Want to see which hotels have the Marketing Directors and HR Managers signed off? Easy. Need to know which Front Desk Managers are good to go for this month’s session? Done. It’s all there in one simple interface.
Don’t we all love a win win scenario?
This is how you get started. First you turn on Group communication in your study seen below:
From there:
Define Your Custom Groups: Set up and define the roles for participants, including key stakeholders like HR managers, department heads, and more.
Track Permissions and Approvals: Follow the approvals process for each group, ensuring all necessary gatekeepers are looped in at the right time.
Email and Engage at Scale: Start sending personalized group emails, schedule research sessions, and make compensation a breeze— all within the same platform.
This lives under Pool > Data > Groups just FYI, but then it really controls how study communication is sent out.
Create any kind of groups
With Ethnio Groups, you can create as many custom groups as needed and map out the specific relationships and roles between each type of participants or gatekeepers for multi-step approvals and diverse recruitment funnels and workflows. The standard participant categories might not cut it.
You might create groups of special customers that contain different types of participants, or have families for parental consent for research with anyone under 18.
The power of Ethnio’s data architecture
At Ethnio, we believe in fast and easy implementation. Groups offers flexibility, scalability, and integration, helping you build a recruitment process As your team and studies grow. Ethnio Groups grows with you, providing the structure and tools to support your evolving needs. From customized participant workflows to a powerful API, Ethnio Groups gives you complete control over how you manage your recruitment efforts.
You get:
Scalability: Whether you're running a small study or a large recruitment campaign
Integration: Easily sync data from other tools and databases to get a unified view of your recruitment workflow.
Time-to-Value: Get started quickly with minimal setup, integrating seamlessly into your existing processes.
By customizing the way you track approvals, communications, and workflows, Ethnio Groups makes participant recruitment and engagement more organized, efficient, and scalable. And the best part? As your needs evolve, Groups grows with you.
Ready to Revolutionize ResearchOps?
We’re excited to see how Groups will empower research teams to run more efficient, organized, and scalable research studies. Explore Ethnio Groups today and see how it can elevate your research operations.
