Unclaimed rewards returned to you
Support | 415-386-8600
Compensate participants across UX studies, market research, customer feedback, and experience surveys with timely options they can actually use. TruCentive makes participant payments easy to design, global to deliver, and transparent to reconcile. For study-specific workflows, explore clinical trial participant payments.
No credit card required. Build and send branded participant-payment samples before you commit.
Compensation recognizes participants’ time, effort, inconvenience, and expertise. It can improve participation and follow-through, but it must be fair, clearly explained, and proportionate to the activity. Strong programs separate compensation from reimbursement, preserve voluntary participation, and build data-quality controls into the study—not into the payment decision.
Survey-incentive meta-analysis · HHS SACHRP payment guidance · NIH participant-compensation guidance · TruCentive research compensation. Results are study-specific and not guaranteed outcomes.
A modest payment can communicate respect and remove a practical barrier to participation. Its adequacy depends on time, inconvenience, expertise, audience, market, and study design—not on one universal dollar amount.
Participants contribute attention, lived experience, professional knowledge, and sometimes emotionally demanding feedback. Compensation makes that contribution visible.
Appropriate payment or reimbursement can offset costs and make participation more feasible for people who cannot easily donate time, travel, connectivity, or caregiving coverage.
A five-minute poll and a ninety-minute specialist interview should not pay the same. Use transparent bands based on duration, burden, scarcity, and required expertise.
Offer relevant choices and let participants decline payment. Choice supports different needs across locations, cultures, access requirements, and personal preferences.
Standardize governance and delivery while letting each study retain its own eligibility, consent language, compensation schedule, milestone rules, reward mix, and participant communications.
Compensate moderated interviews, prototype evaluations, concept tests, accessibility studies, and unmoderated task completion.
Support qualitative interviews, segmentation work, product studies, concept research, and consumer panels with appropriate incentives.
Thank customers for NPS follow-up, product feedback, journey research, service recovery studies, and customer advisory participation.
Improve completion for relationship, transactional, employee-experience, alumni, community, and post-event surveys while monitoring sample effects.
Handle scheduled sessions, multi-person groups, expert councils, co-design workshops, and community research with clear payout rules.
Deliver compensation at defined checkpoints for diaries, longitudinal interviews, recurring panels, and multi-stage research without manual chaos.
TruCentive combines participant choice with the controls Research, Finance, Procurement, Security, Privacy, and Legal expect. Build from templates or a blank canvas, personalize the experience, automate reminders, and see the who, what, and when of each delivery.
Mix gift cards, merchandise, payments, prepaid cards, and other options instead of assuming one incentive works for every participant.
Reach participants in more than 150 countries, with national brands and 85,000+ local merchant options for market-level relevance.
Send by email, SMS, both, printed links, or bulk links. Add automated reminders that stop after claim and a post-claim thank-you or next-step message.
Track recipient activity and claim status. With Pay as You Go, TruCentive returns unclaimed compensation value to your account.
Unused compensation value
May be trapped in purchased cards, retained as provider breakage, or difficult to return to the study budget.
Returned to your TruCentive account under Pay as You Go.
Participant choice
One gift card or separate vendors by participant group and country.
1M+ gift card, payment, merchandise, prepaid, and other options.
Research operations
Manual purchasing, code inventories, spreadsheets, and one-off participant emails.
Reusable branded projects, individual or list-based sends, email/SMS, and bulk links.
Participant follow-through
One payment message with no claim-aware communication.
Automated reminders stop after claim; post-claim messages can confirm receipt or next steps.
Reconciliation
Limited recipient-level visibility and difficult closeout reporting.
Track delivery, recipient activity, claims, reminders, and unclaimed value.
TruCentive reports 14%–32% waste in research compensation and says 31.9% of digital incentives went unclaimed in 2025. It also says most Pay as You Go customers save 23% after fees. Results depend on study design, compensation value, audience, timing, and claim rate. See current pricing and features.
Define whether each payment is reimbursement, fair compensation for time and effort, appreciation, or a completion incentive. Set bands, approvals, withdrawal rules, tax handling, and ethics or institutional review requirements.
Explain the study, privacy expectations, eligibility, payment amount, timing, milestones, and what happens after withdrawal. Choose accessible channels and participant-relevant options.
Deliver after the activity or at approved checkpoints for multi-stage work. Use automation for repeatable studies while keeping participant records appropriately separated and protected.
Monitor delivery, claims, failed messages, duplicates, quality flags, partial completions, and unclaimed value. Close the loop with Finance without exposing unnecessary research data.
No. Reimbursement repays participation-related expenses such as travel or connectivity. Compensation recognizes time, effort, inconvenience, or expertise. Study materials and approvals should describe each clearly.
Payment is generally permissible, but it should be fair and not so excessive that it compromises voluntary decision-making. HHS guidance notes that reasonable reimbursement, fair compensation, and token appreciation do not inherently create undue-influence concerns. Follow applicable institutional review.
State this before enrollment. For multi-stage work, consider prorated or milestone-based compensation so payment does not pressure participants to remain. Follow the approved protocol, consent language, and institutional policy.
Incentives can change who participates and may encourage speed or duplicate attempts. Keep payment independent of particular answers, use neutral wording, monitor completion time and consistency, deduplicate, and compare sample composition where possible.
Yes. TruCentive offers international options in more than 150 countries. Confirm availability, privacy, consent, tax, sanctions, employment, and research-ethics requirements for every market and participant type.
Under TruCentive Pay as You Go, unclaimed compensation value returns to your account. That supports cleaner closeout and lets approved funds be reused instead of becoming provider margin.
Bring one real study and participant profile to a TruCentive design session. Leave with a branded sample, a practical compensation schedule, and a clearer workflow for delivery and reconciliation.
1M+ options · 250+ countries and territories · Email, SMS & bulk links · Automated reminders · Unclaimed value returned with Pay as You Go