Distribution

Once a survey is published, the Send step becomes your share surface. You can distribute the same survey several ways at once.

Ways to share

Reusable entry link — a public URL you can send to anyone. Behind the scenes it creates or resumes a participant-specific access grant for each person who opens it, so you get individual tracking from a single shared link.

QR code — generated from the entry link. Useful for workshops, retro rooms, and printed material.

Email invites — send directly from ScatterSpoke, with optional scheduling and reminders.

Embed — drop the survey into an existing page with the provided snippet.

How access actually works

Each participant’s access is a Survey Distribution — an individual grant that determines whether that person can enter, resume, edit, or is blocked.

Two things are decided separately, and it’s worth keeping them apart:

• The Survey Distribution decides what this participant may do.
• The survey’s state decides whether the run as a whole is accepting responses.

So closing a survey stops everyone, while an expired distribution stops one person.

Expiration

A Survey Distribution stops granting access after its expiration. The default is seven days.

The survey defines the default for newly created distributions, and each distribution stores the expiration it resolved to when it was created. Changing the survey’s default doesn’t retroactively change grants already issued.

Response quota

You can optionally cap how many responses a survey run will accept with a response quota.

The important detail: quota is consumed on submission, not on opening. Someone who opens the survey and abandons it doesn’t use a slot. Someone who saves a draft doesn’t either.

Quotas are common for anonymous collection and first-N participation, but they work with any distribution method.

Practical guidance

For a broad ask, use the reusable entry link. You still get per-participant tracking, and there’s nothing to manage per person.

For a specific list of people, use email invites — you get delivery state per recipient and can schedule reminders.

For anything time-boxed, check the expiration before sending. Seven days is the default, which is short for an audience that includes people on holiday.

If you’re capping participation, set the quota before you share rather than after. A quota added later doesn’t retract responses already collected.