How to Create an Anonymous Survey in Clappia

If you've ever run an employee feedback survey and gotten back nothing but safe, non-committal answers, you already know the problem: people soften their opinions the moment they think their name is attached to them. The fix isn't a better question — it's removing the ability to trace an answer back to a person at all. That's what an anonymous survey does, and it's harder to pull off correctly than most people assume, because "anonymous" isn't a checkbox in most tools. It's a combination of how the form is shared, what fields it collects, and how it's distributed.

This guide walks through building a genuinely anonymous survey in Clappia, a no-code app builder that businesses use to create forms, checklists, and internal tools without writing code. The mechanism that makes a Clappia survey anonymous is a distribution setting called Link Sharing — it's worth understanding before you touch the form builder, because it determines what you can and can't ask.

What "Anonymous" Actually Means for a Survey

An anonymous survey doesn't collect any information that could identify who submitted it — no name, no email, no employee ID, no account login tied to the response. This is different from a confidential survey, where identities are collected but promised to be kept private. True anonymity means there's nothing to leak in the first place, because it was never captured.

Two things break anonymity even when you think you've removed the obvious fields:

1. A login requirement. If someone has to sign in to submit the form, the platform usually knows who they are even if you don't display it.
2. Narrow demographic questions. Asking for department, tenure, and location in the same form can narrow the respondent pool down to one identifiable person, even with no name field. This is a well-documented re-identification risk — the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's guidance on de-identifying datasets covers exactly this problem: removing direct identifiers isn't enough if the remaining fields, combined, still point to one person.

Keep both of these in mind while you build. They're the difference between a survey that's technically missing a name field and one that's actually anonymous.

Step 1: Build the Survey Form

Log in to your Clappia workplace and create a new app, then open the Design App section to start adding blocks. Each block is one question or piece of content on the form.

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A few configuration choices matter more than they look like they do:

• Mark only the questions you actually need answered as Required. Every block has a Required toggle in its right-hand configuration panel — leave demographic or optional questions off, since a required field pushes people to answer even when they'd rather skip it.
• Group related questions with a Section. Sections let you apply conditional logic to a whole group of questions at once, which is useful if you want to skip a block of questions based on an earlier answer.
• Use "Display this field if" for skip logic, not a separate identifying question. You can conditionally show or hide a field based on another field's answer using Clappia's formula syntax — this lets you branch the survey without asking who's answering.
• Don't add a Single Line Text field for "Name" or "Email" unless you actually need it. This sounds obvious, but it's the single most common way a supposedly anonymous survey stops being anonymous. If you need to send respondents a thank-you email or a raffle entry, that already requires identifying them — decide up front whether that trade-off is worth it.

Step 2: Turn On Link Sharing

This is the setting that actually makes the survey anonymous. Without it, anyone accessing the app needs a Clappia account, which means the platform is tracking who's responding whether you display that data or not.

1. Open the app you just built.
2. Go to Design App.
3. Click the Distribute tab.
4. Click Link Sharing.
5. On the right-hand panel, enable the Link Sharing toggle.
6. Copy the generated URL.

Anyone with that link can open the survey in a browser and submit a response — no sign-up, no login, no Clappia account required.

Once Link Sharing is on, Clappia doesn't automatically record who submitted the form. It only captures what the respondent actually types into the fields you built — there's no background account-level tracking the way there is for logged-in users. That's what makes it fundamentally different from just hiding a "collect email" toggle: the identity was never captured, not just hidden from view.

QR Code Distribution

Once Link Sharing is enabled, Clappia generates a QR code pointing to the same public link. This matters for anonymous surveys collected in person — a printed poster at an event, a table tent at an office kitchen, a sign in a break room. A respondent scans it on their own phone, submits from their own browser session, and nothing ties the response back to a device or account you control. Submissions through the QR code follow the same anonymous, browser-only behavior as the link itself.

Show on Workplace Dashboard

You'll also see a Show on Workplace Dashboard toggle, on by default. If your survey is meant to be filled out only by people outside your organization, turning this off keeps it from cluttering your own team's dashboard while the public link keeps working exactly the same for external respondents. Admins still see it regardless.

Step 3: Know What Link Sharing Respondents Can and Can't Do

When someone opens a link-shared survey, they see a stripped-down version of the app with just the App Home tab — they can fill it in, submit it, and hit Submit Another to send a second response. What they can't do is view past submissions, edit an answer after submitting, or see any status or approval workflow tied to the response. That's not a limitation you work around — for an anonymous survey it's the point. There's no account for them to log back into, so there's nothing to expose.

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If your use case needs people to come back and check the status of what they submitted — a support ticket, an approval request — User Access is the right setting, not Link Sharing. But that also means it's not the setting for an anonymous survey, since adding someone to your workplace inherently identifies them.

Step 4: Design Questions That Stay Anonymous

Turning on Link Sharing solves the technical side of anonymity. The question design side is on you. A few practical rules:

• Avoid stacking multiple demographic filters. "Department + tenure + location" on a 40-person team can narrow a response down to one person even without a name field.
• State clearly, in the form itself, that the survey is anonymous. Use a Text, HTML & Embedding block at the top to say so directly — respondents answer more honestly when they know it up front rather than guessing.
• Don't promise anonymity you're not actually providing. If you added an email field "just in case," the survey isn't anonymous anymore — say so instead of implying otherwise.
• There's no built-in "one response per person" limit on a link-shared survey, because there's no identity to check a second submission against. If duplicate prevention matters more than anonymity for your use case, that's a sign you need User Access instead, not a workaround inside Link Sharing.

This matches what the research on anonymous surveys generally shows: identity removal increases candor, but only if the question design doesn't quietly reintroduce identifiability through the back door. A study on resident-to-faculty feedback published via PubMed found that the anonymity of a feedback channel materially changes what people are willing to say — which is exactly why the setup matters more than it looks like it should.

Step 5: Distribute the Survey

Once Link Sharing is on, you have a public URL and a QR code. From here:

• Share the link directly — email, Slack, a chat message, a website footer.
• Print the QR code for in-person collection at events, front desks, or break rooms.
• Embed it on a webpage if you want the survey to load directly on your site instead of linking out — Clappia supports this through Embed on Website under the same Distribute tab, so respondents fill it in without ever seeing a separate Clappia URL.

Workflows still run in the background even though the respondent can't interact with them — Clappia can still send you an admin notification email, or trigger conditional logic when a submission comes in, without the respondent ever seeing that any of it happened.

Beyond the Survey Itself

The same Link Sharing mechanism that makes a survey anonymous is what Clappia uses generally for feedback forms, event registrations, and external intake forms — it's the same setting whether you're building a one-off pulse survey or a public event RSVP form. Because Clappia apps aren't limited to a static form — the same app can later grow a submissions dashboard, an approval workflow, or a report, if a use case that started as "just collect anonymous feedback" later needs more than that. You build the form once in the app designer and decide separately, through Distribute, whether it stays a simple public form or becomes something people log into.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a Clappia survey anonymous by default, or do I have to configure it?

Not by default. An app in Clappia normally requires the respondent to have access as a logged-in user. It becomes anonymous when you specifically enable Link Sharing under Distribute, which removes the login requirement and stops Clappia from tying the response to an account.

Can I still collect a name or email and have the survey be anonymous?

No. The moment you add a field asking for identifying information and the respondent fills it in, you've captured their identity — Clappia only avoids tracking identity when you don't ask for it. Link Sharing prevents account-level tracking, not form-field data you explicitly collect.

Can respondents edit or delete their answer after submitting an anonymous survey?

No. Link-shared respondents don't have an account to log back into, so they can't view or edit a past submission. If a correction is needed, they'd need to submit the form again as a new response.

Does an anonymous Clappia survey work on the Clappia mobile app?

No. Link-shared apps are browser-only. The mobile app is limited to users who are logged in with access explicitly granted, which is the opposite of what an anonymous survey needs.

How is this different from making a Google Form anonymous?

In Google Forms, you build the form and then separately uncheck a "collect email addresses" setting. In Clappia, anonymity comes from the distribution method itself — Link Sharing removes the login requirement entirely, rather than hiding one collected field after the fact.

Is there a free way to build an anonymous survey in Clappia?

Clappia offers a free plan you can build and test an anonymous survey app on before deciding if you need anything beyond a simple form.