I’m new to softr and trying to build out a portal to do surveys on, and I’m trying to figure out if what I’m trying to do is possible.
I have about 15,000 people in a database that are essentially potential users. Only a fraction of those would, I imagine, sign up for a portal. But I don’t know which people would or wouldn’t.
Without knowing anything about the backend involved here, what I would like to do is have a simple system in which all the user info is loaded into Softr and then anyone who wants to actually sign up just has to “recover” their password to actively join. But my concern with that is that such an approach is that I’d have to upgrade to enterprise just to handle 15,000 users, a majority of whom wouldn’t log in. But maybe I’m wrong?
So…is my approach feasible? Is there a better approach in anyone’s mind? Could I just send out an email asking people to sign up instead and then link those usernames to the existing email addresses I have on file?
Any advice is appreciated!
Hi @Cantrall and welcome to the community!
I confess I’m a little unclear from your description exactly what benefit would be derived from pre-creating the users from your database. My best guess is that the only benefit is that, for whatever fields you want to gather from a user on sign-up, you will already have those values.
But it seems to me that since your database information can get stale, you’ll want users to reconfirm their values on signup – and the more info you have about a given user, the more important this reconfirmation process is going to be.
So now I think the benefit is further reduced to: you’d like to be able to pre-fill the signup form with the fields you have on file for the user, to make their life a little easier.
This has a couple of challenges to it.
- You need to be sure you really have the right user record from the database, or else you’re going to expose someone’s personal info to the wrong person. If they enter an email address and you have a record for that email address in your database, is that good enough?
- Some users will see their personal information pre-filled and think “hey that’s cool, I don’t have to retype it.” Others will think “this is creepy, how did they know all this stuff about me?” Is that ok?
I hear you on protecting data. This is why I’d want to go the “recover your password” route for linking a user to existing data. You’d need access to the email account to proceed forward, basically.
As for the creepy factor, this whole thing is an opt-in database for surveys and such. So people filled out an extensive form where they proactively answered a number of questions (75 or so different fields in Airtable per person). They shouldn’t be too creeped out by it since it was such a proactive process.
The point of the whole system would be:
- Let people in our database keep their info fresh. New address, phone number, etc, just fill out the new one.
- Be able to proactively fill out new surveys as they become available, with the results of those surveys linked to the already-existing profile.
I’m only really focusing on the first part to begin with as I’m not sure about feasibility.
I’d be fine with re-confirmation at sign-up too, if that’s feasible without compromising any info, of course.
If you want to literally use the password recovery feature in Softr, then you would need to pre-create all the users, so that they would all be eligible for password recovery.
However, what might work better would be to have an “activation” form on the site that you send to the users in your database, and the form is available to non-logged-in Softr users, and they enter their email address and maybe one other field, and then it goes to Make. At Make, it looks up the user in your database, and if it finds them, it creates the Softr user, populates their user record with the data you have for that user, and then initiates a password recovery on their behalf.
Using Make to set up a workflow does seem like the prudent solution, thanks!