Recruiting participants through Outset requires funding, and Outset’s wallet system makes it easy to manage payments for your study. Here’s how the process works.
Note that for some organizations, wallets are maintained by a central administrator role. Please follow your organization's established guidelines for adding and using wallet funds.
1. Set up your wallet
Before adding funds, ensure your Outset wallet is set up:
Go to Organization Settings and locate the Recruitment Wallet section.
If it's your first time, click “Set Up Wallet” and follow the prompts.
Choose your preferred payment method. Note that paying by credit card is recommended for instant funding - invoicing can take several days due to bank transfer times.
If you set up funding via credit/debit card, you will be directed to Stripe to enter payment details. If you select invoicing, you will be prompted to add an invoice email that will receive any invoices for recruitment.
Consider pre-funding your recruitment wallet:
It is possible to pre-fund your recruitment wallet (e.g., add $3000 at the beginning of the quarter, so it is available throughout the quarter for any recruitment needs). You can either pre-fund your wallet with a given amount that makes sense for your organization, or you can fund specific amounts based on recruitment quotes for individual studies (read more below).
💡Tip: Please contact our team at [email protected] if you need immediate access to funds and invoicing is delayed due to bank transfer wait times.
2. Review recruitment cost quotes
Review recruitment cost quotes
Once your recruiting filters are set up on the “Recruit” tab, review the amount quoted for recruitment.
If using User Interviews, the quoted cost includes screening-out fees, so you can add the exact amount to your wallet, and that will be the total charged
For Prolific, beyond the up-front charge, there will be some additional relatively small fees for candidates who take the screener survey and are screened out. These screen-out fees will be charged after your study recruitment is completed.
🚨Watch-out: while these Prolific screen-out fees are relatively small per screened-out candidate, if your incidence rate for target participants is very small (e.g., 1%, meaning 100 candidates need to be screened for 1 qualified participant), those fees can stack up, so consider your audience when estimating total recruiting costs.
Depending on your study timeline and audience, you may want to consider adding additional incentives to speed up your recruitment timeline. To add additional incentives, click “advanced recruitment settings” on the Recruit tab, and add a per-participant payout bonus.
💡Tip: Higher incentives often lead to faster recruitment, especially for harder-to-reach demographics.
3. Add funds to your wallet (by credit card or invoicing)
Once your final recruiting estimate is set, navigate to Recruitment Wallet > Add Funds (button on the upper right) and add the total amount desired to your wallet. Confirm and complete the transaction.
There are two ways to add funds, depending on your payment method:
By credit card (recommended):
Click Add Funds in the Recruitment Wallet, enter the amount, and complete the transaction to add funds to your wallet instantly
By invoicing:
Click Add Funds in the Recruitment Wallet
Enter the amount needed and add a memo
This will automatically generate an invoice and send it to your organization’s billing contact via email
The invoice can be paid by credit card by your billing contact (for immediate funds) or via bank transfer (which may take a few business days to process)
Publish your recruitment
Once you have available funds in your wallet matching your recruitment quote, you will be able to set your recruiting live through the Recruit page, and the wallet funds will automatically subtract.
4. Managing and adjusting funds
Double-check before confirming your payments
Once funds are added to your recruitment wallet, those funds cannot be withdrawn or refunded. If you don’t use those funds for your currently in-progress study, you can use them for a later study.
Once you launch recruitment for a specific study, similarly those funds cannot be withdrawn or refunded, so double-check before you set your recruiting live. For example, if you recruit for 50 people and then later decide you only want to pay for 30, those funds are not recoverable.
Option to “soft launch” a study to manage recruiting budget
If you are working with a more limited recruiting budget, or want to do extra testing with your study, one way to accommodate this is to “soft launch” your study.
As an example, you can create “Version 1” of your study, recruit 10-15 people, and then review the results to determine whether you want to continue recruiting. If you do, there are two methods to expand your participant count after pausing the study.
If recruiting with Prolific, you can click “Add Participants” on the Recruit tab and add more participants to the study
If recruiting with User Interviews, you can make a copy of the study (“Version 2”) and then recruit additional people through that study.
🚨Watch-out: reminder that if you have multiple copies of a study, analysis can get complicated if there are changes to the guide between different versions of the study. For best results, keep the guide content exactly the same.
Hope these tips help - happy recruiting!