Why are there so many Anonymous responses?

If a respondent doesn't leave their contact details when responding to your videoask, their responses will appear in your videoask inbox as "Anonymous" and you won't be able to reply to them. 😢

Here, we'll take a look at why this happens, how you can minimize these anonymous responses, and how to add contact details to an Anonymous response if you recognize the respondent. Scroll through the full article or click on the links below to jump to the most relevant section.

Why am I receiving "Anonymous " responses?

When you create a videoask, you have the option to collect contact details from your respondents. You can make this a required step, or allow your respondents to choose whether to leave their details.

If you don't enable the contact form, then all respondents to your videoask will appear as "Anonymous", because we have no other way to identify them. 🙂

A VideoAsk inbox with the contact form disabled:

If you've enabled the contact form but you're still seeing a lot of Anonymous responses, this is because the respondent chose not to leave any contact information.

In this situation, the respondent can still submit a text, audio, or video response (providing you didn't make contact form fields required) but they will appear as Anonymous in your inbox and the Reply button will be deactivated.

If you've made the contact form fields required, respondents can still submit answers to any steps that come before the contact form, and these responses will appear as an Anonymous response in your inbox.

A VideoAsk inbox with the contact form enabled, but with some responses without contact details:

Keep in mind that VideoAsk works differently than some traditional online forms. In VideoAsk, there's no final "submit" button that sends all answers to the server at once.

Instead, when a respondent interacts with your videoask, their answers are sent to the server upon completion of each step, rather than all at once at the end.

This means that you'll still receive answers in your inbox even if the respondent didn't answer every single step (resulting in incomplete Anonymous responses).

For example, let's say we've created a 3-step videoask with our required contact form placed after step 2: our respondents can answer steps 1 and 2 of our videoask and their answers will be sent to our videoask inbox after each submission.

However, if they choose not to complete their contact details after step 2 and close their browser, we'll have no way of capturing their contact information and they'll appear as Anonymous in our inbox. They won't be able to progress to step 3 of our videoask and we won't be able to reply to them.

Minimize the number of Anonymous responses

There's no way to guarantee people will want to give out their contact details. However, here are a few suggestions that can help:

Add a step explaining why you are collecting contact information and how you'll use it.
Enable a consent checkbox.
Experiment with where the contact form is placed in your videoask, so respondents aren't immediately asked to give their contact details on the first step of your videoask before interacting or engaging.
Make contact form fields required.

How to make contact form fields required

From your VideoAsk account, click Build to open the builder.

Click the Contact form icon.

Here you can choose which fields to enable and whether they are required or optional:

Click on the eye icon to enable or disable a field.
Click the * icon to make a field required or optional.

If you'd like to collect consent when respondents submit their contact details (and any other information to your videoask), enable the Ask for consent field.

When you do, placeholder consent text will be added to your form. Make sure to update this with your specific terms!

When finished, click Done. Now, when respondents see your contact form, they'll have to enter their contact details and give consent for any required fields before they can proceed with the rest of your videoask.

Add contact details to a Anonymous response

Assign an existing contact to an Anonymous response:

If you've received an "Anonymous" response, but you recognize the respondent from the video they've submitted or the answers they've given, you might already have their contact details saved in your contacts directory if you've interacted with them previously through VideoAsk. You can assign the contact details to the Anonymous response, and then you'll be able to reply back to them as normal.

In the example below we've received an Anonymous response, but from the video submitted, we recognize it's Andrew. We've previously collected Andrew's contact details in another videoask, so now we'll be able to assign the previous contact details to this response.

Select the Anonymous response from your inbox and click the three vertical dots next to it.

Click Assign to contact. This will allow us to connect Andrew's anonymous response to his existing contact details.

Enter their email address and select the correct contact information from the contact list.

Click Update to assign the existing contact information to the response.

The Anonymous response will now have Andrew's contact details assigned instead so we can go ahead and reply back to him. In the contacts directory, pictured below, we'll now see all of Andrew's responses under his contact details.

Create a new contact for a Anonymous response:

If you've received an Anonymous response and know their contact details (but they're not already listed in your VideoAsk contacts directory), you can add their contact information to their response and they'll be saved in your contacts directory.

Select the Anonymous response from your inbox and click on the three vertical dots next to it.