How to pay survey participants with gift cards
You finished the study. Now you owe forty people $10 each, and the last thing you want is to become a part-time payments clerk. Here is how to send every participant a gift card from a single spreadsheet, in about ten minutes, without writing a line of code.
Not running a study? This is one of the most common uses of SendReward, but the same spreadsheet flow covers customer rewards, employee recognition, referral bonuses and giveaways — see all the ways to send.
Why gift cards, not cash
If you have ever tried to pay research participants in cash, you already know the problems. You need their bank details, which people are reluctant to hand over. You have to run a payment batch, which usually means involving finance or a developer. International participants are a nightmare. And cash creates a paper trail you have to reconcile at the end of the study.
Gift cards sidestep almost all of it. You only need an email address. The participant gets something they actually want, delivered in seconds, and they choose the brand themselves. For most academic, market-research and product-research studies, a $10 or $25 gift card is the standard thank-you, and it is what participants expect.
There is one thing gift cards are not good for: when a participant genuinely needs money rather than a card — for example, a longitudinal study paying a meaningful amount, or a population where a card is useless. In those cases you want cash or PayPal, and you should use a platform built for it. We will cover that at the end.
The old way vs. the ten-minute way
The traditional path looks like this: collect emails in one spreadsheet, figure out amounts, ask whoever runs your payments to "run a batch," wait a week, chase the ones that failed, and manually reconcile who got paid. Every step is a place where a participant slips through the cracks and emails you three times asking where their card is.
The ten-minute path replaces all of that with one upload. You keep your participant list in a spreadsheet — which you already have — add an amount column, and hand the whole file to SendReward. It sends every card, shows you which ones were delivered, and gives you a results file you can drop straight into your records. No developer, no payment batch, no week of waiting.
Step by step: paying participants from a spreadsheet
1. Create a free account (and use the test balance first)
Sign up at sendreward.com. Every new account comes with $1,000 of free test balance. Test rewards behave exactly like real ones — same screens, same statuses, same results file — except nothing is actually emailed and nothing is charged. Run your whole first campaign in test mode so you can see the flow end to end before you spend a cent. When you are happy, fund the account and switch to live.
2. Put your participants in a spreadsheet
Open your participant list in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. You need these columns:
| Column | Required? | What it is |
|---|---|---|
email | Required | Where the gift card is sent. |
amount | Required | A plain number — 10 or 10.00, never $10 or 1,000. |
name | Optional | Used in the greeting (“Thanks, Maria!”). |
reference | Optional | Your own ID for the row — a participant code, a response ID. This is how you prevent duplicates. |
message | Optional | A personal note shown in the email. Worth filling in. |
If you would rather not build the file by hand, download the template from the campaign screen and paste your data into it. The header row has to stay exactly as it is.
Pro tip on amounts. If everyone gets the same amount, you can leave the amount column filled with the same number down the sheet, or set a single default. If some participants get more (say, $25 for a 60-minute interview and $10 for a 10-minute survey), just put the right number in each row — one file can mix amounts freely.
3. Upload and preview
Go to New campaign and upload your CSV or Excel file. SendReward reads it and shows a preview of every row before anything is sent. This is the step that saves you from embarrassment: you can see the total cost, spot a participant who was accidentally given $100 instead of $10, and catch malformed email addresses. Rows with problems are flagged and held back rather than sent wrong.
4. Write the message
Set a campaign name (for your own records), a default message, an email subject, and the sender name. The message is the difference between a transaction and a thank-you, so use it: “Thank you for taking part in our study — your feedback genuinely helps. Here is a small thank-you.” Each row can still override the message if you want to personalise.
5. Fund the account and send
Add funds by bank transfer (free) or card (3% + $0.30). The preview shows the total against your balance, so you always know what a campaign will cost before you commit. Click send and every card goes out. Recipients get a single, branded email from SendReward — they will not receive a second, confusing message from a third party.
6. Track results and keep your records
As cards are delivered and redeemed, the campaign screen updates. When you are done, download a results CSV that shows, per row, the status and any error. Drop it in your study folder and you have a clean audit trail of exactly who was paid, how much, and whether they claimed it. Failed rows can be fixed and retried without touching the ones that succeeded.
Handling the things that always come up
Duplicates. The fastest way to pay someone twice is to run the same list twice. Give every row a unique reference and SendReward will refuse to create a second reward for a reference it has already seen. We wrote a separate guide on stopping duplicate rewards.
Wrong or bouncing emails. Bad addresses are flagged, not charged, and you can correct them and retry only the failures. If a participant says the email went to spam, you can resend the same card without paying again.
People who did not finish. Only include participants who completed the study in your file. Because the whole thing is one upload, it is easy to build the list carefully at the end rather than paying people as they go.
Partial completion or bonus amounts. Mix amounts in one file. A $10 base and a $15 bonus for the full-completion group is just two different numbers in the amount column.
What it costs
You pay face value for each gift card — a $10 card costs $10. There is no platform fee, no per-reward fee and no subscription. Funding by bank transfer is free; funding by credit card adds 3% + $0.30 to cover what the card networks charge us. For a 40-person study at $10 each, that is $400, full stop. (If you need to reconcile this against other providers, see our honest comparison of gift card platforms.)
When you should use something else
We would rather tell you than have you find out later. Choose a larger platform such as Tremendous or Tango if you need to pay participants in cash, PayPal or bank transfer; if you are paying across many countries and currencies; or if you need native integrations with a survey tool like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey built in. Those platforms charge a fee for cash payouts and card funding, but they do things SendReward does not.
SendReward is the right tool when you want to send gift cards, quickly, at face value, without a sales call or a developer — which describes the large majority of survey and study payouts.
Frequently asked questions
Can I really do this without a developer?
Yes. The whole flow is a web form: you upload a spreadsheet, check the preview, and click send. There is an API if you want one later, but nothing about paying survey participants requires it.
What columns does the spreadsheet need?
Five, and only two are required: email and amount. The optional ones are name (used in the greeting), reference (your own ID for the row, like a participant code) and message (a personal note). Download the template and you will see the exact format.
How do I format the amount?
A plain number, no dollar sign and no commas. 10 or 10.00, not $10.00. The template shows this.
What if a participant email bounces or is wrong?
The row is flagged in the results, you are not charged, and you can fix the address and retry just the failed rows from the same campaign screen.
How do I stop the same person claiming twice?
Give every row a unique reference (for example the participant ID). SendReward uses that reference so a duplicate row cannot create a second reward, and you can filter your reward list by it. See preventing duplicate rewards.
What does it cost?
You pay face value for each gift card. There is no platform fee and no per-reward fee. Funding by bank transfer is free; funding by credit card adds 3% + $0.30, which is what the card networks charge us.
Which gift cards can participants choose?
You send a reward; the recipient picks the brand they want from the available catalog — Amazon, Starbucks, Target, Visa prepaid and many more. You do not have to guess which brand each person likes.
Can I pay participants in cash or by PayPal instead?
Not on SendReward — we send gift cards and prepaid cards only. If some participants need cash or PayPal, a larger platform such as Tremendous or Tango supports those (with a fee). Most survey payouts work well as gift cards.
Pay your next study in ten minutes.
Free account, $1,000 test balance, no code, no sales call.