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Last updated: 24 Sep 2021

feedback: Email Survey Signups

This type of feedback is not actually feedback, it's a response from a banner displayed by static asking users to provide an email address where we can send them a link to a survey. You can find out more about surveys in static by reading the documentation.

The request will contain an email_address (the users email address), a survey_source (the path on GOV.UK where the sign up form was displayed), ga_client_id (the Google Analytics client ID for that user's session), and survey_id (the survey they were invited to take part in). The survey_id should match with an instance of EmailSurvey defined in app/models/email_survey.rb. These instances, like their counterparts in static, have start and endtimes so that we don't send emails when the survey has closed. Unlike their counterparts in static they do not have match rules on the path - response that gets past an survey_id check and is in the active? time period will be sent an email.

The email is sent using GOV.UK Notify using the "GOV.UK Public" service, with a distinct service running per environment. The API key is provided with the env var:

GOVUK_NOTIFY_API_KEY

The email template is provided with the env var: GOVUK_NOTIFY_SURVEY_SIGNUP_TEMPLATE_ID

Deployed environments have this filled in via puppet and our standard mechanism for handling keys. On the GOV.UK dev vm you'll want to join the service on GOV.UK Notify and create your own API key. When creating a key for yourself choosese either:

  • "test" - which won't send any emails at all, but will give you valid responses from the API
  • "team" - which will only send emails to people on the team or the whitelisted email addresses.

Note that future versions may allow for different surveys to use different templates, but they'll still all have to belong to the same Notify service.

Notify template parameters

Please be aware that notify templates can be parameterised. Notify will error if we don't send the correct params. You can read more about this in the docs: docs/notify_template_parameters.md.

NB: Adding new parameters will require a deploy.