# Audiences and respondent management

Canonical page: https://www.questionpunk.com/support/audiences

Create and manage audiences to organize respondents across your surveys.

Time: 10-15 minutes

Level: Intermediate

Audience: Researchers, Product teams, Panel managers

## Steps

### 1. Open the Participants page

Click **Participants** in the main navigation sidebar to access the respondent management dashboard. AI-generated personas live under the separate **AI Personas** sidebar entry, which shares the same underlying respondent database.

### 2. Create an audience

Click **New Audience** to create a named group. Audiences help you organize respondents by study, demographic, or any criteria you choose.

### 3. Add respondents

From **Participants**, add real respondents (with email, phone, external ID, source, and notes) or bulk-upload them via **CSV import**. Synthetic AI personas are created separately from the **AI Personas** sidebar entry, which shares the same underlying respondent database.

### 4. Bulk import from CSV

Click **Import CSV** to open the 5-step import wizard: upload your file, map columns to respondent fields (name, email, phone, country, region, city, and custom fields), preview the data, configure the respondent type and audience assignment, then import in batches with a progress tracker.

### 5. Filter and explore

Filter respondents by type (synthetic, real, or imported), source, email status, response history, date range, and geographic location (country, region, city). Switch between **Table view** and **Map view** to see respondent distribution on a world map.

### 6. Manage respondents

Select respondents for bulk actions: move between audiences, merge duplicates, archive, or delete. Click a respondent to view their full profile including persona details, cross-survey participation history, audience memberships, and geographic data.

### 7. Tag respondents with codes

Assign colored codes (labels) to individual respondents from the Results tab. Codes are survey-scoped — each survey has its own set of codes. Create codes on the fly with a name and color, then toggle them on or off for any respondent. Codes appear as colored pills on the response detail panel and can be included in CSV and XLSX exports.

### 8. Add comments to respondents

Leave internal notes on any respondent from the Results tab. Comments are visible to your team, timestamped, and attributed to the team member who wrote them. Edit or delete comments at any time. The Audiences page shows a read-only comment count for each respondent.

### 9. Merge and deduplicate

Select multiple respondent records and click **Merge** to combine them into a single profile. The merge transfers all survey responses, audience memberships, and fills in missing fields from secondary records. Automatic deduplication also detects and excludes duplicate responses from the same respondent on a survey.

## Details

Audiences centralize respondent management across all your surveys. Create separate audiences for different studies, demographics, or recruitment sources.

Three respondent types are supported: **Synthetic** (AI personas for testing), **Real** (human respondents added manually or from panel providers like Prolific), and **Imported** (bulk-uploaded from CSV files).

The CSV import wizard auto-maps common column names (name, email, phone, etc.) and supports custom persona detail fields for unmapped columns.

The **Map view** shows respondent distribution on a world map, with color-coded markers breaking down synthetic vs. real respondents by location.

Respondent profiles track geographic data (country, region, city), demographic data (age, sex, nationality, ethnicity, student status, employment status), contact info (email, phone, LinkedIn URL), source, participation history across surveys, and fraud scores. Demographics can be imported via CSV with automatic source tracking.

Bulk operations let you efficiently manage large respondent pools: select multiple respondents to move, archive, or delete in one action.

**Merge** combines multiple respondent records into one primary profile, transferring survey responses and audience memberships. Automatic deduplication detects duplicate responses from the same respondent on a survey and excludes them from results.

**Codes** let you tag respondents with colored labels for categorization, filtering, and export. Codes are scoped per survey, so each study can have its own coding scheme. Create, rename, recolor, or delete codes from the response detail panel. Codes can be assigned manually, generated by AI (from qualitative analysis coding sessions), or promoted from AI-generated labels.

**Comments** let your team leave internal notes on respondents. Comments are timestamped and attributed, creating an audit trail. Use them to flag interesting respondents, note follow-up actions, or share observations with colleagues.

## Related articles

- [Synthetic testing with AI personas](https://www.questionpunk.com/support/synthetic-testing.md)
- [Focus groups with AI agents](https://www.questionpunk.com/support/focus-groups.md)
- [Prolific and panel integrations](https://www.questionpunk.com/support/integrations-prolific.md)