What Does The Survey Invite Status Mean?

Once you have sent out your survey invitations (either direct from Forms Pro or using Power Automate to generate and send out the invitation emails), how do we know what’s happened to them? If you have looked in the Common Data Service using a Model-Driven App, or have paid attention to the invitations in Forms Pro, you might have seen a status. The survey invite status tells us exactly what’s going on. Let’s have a look at the possible values that could be displayed.

Here is how you can view them in Forms Pro. Click on the responses tab on your survey, then click on the number in the invitations card at the top of the overview. All of your invitations can be seen, along with filters for each status.

If you are viewing from CDS, you can navigate to the Survey Invites overview and see the status from there.

So what are they? Here are all of the statuses that could be used, and exactly what they mean.

Queued

The survey invitation email is queued to be sent. This is more likely to happen if you are sending out emails from Forms Pro to multiple contacts at one time.

Delayed

This means there is some kind of delay in delivering the survey invitation email. The Forms Pro service will retry and attempt to send again at a future point.

Failed

The survey invitation email wasn’t delivered to the recipient due to an incorrect email address or other error. So if you’ve got a typo, or the email address doesn’t exist, expect to see this status.

Unsubscribed

If the person you are trying to send the survey invitation email to has previously unsubscribed (clicking the link in a prior Forms Pro email), the email will not be sent to them and this status will be used.

Sent

This is the one we want to see, which means the survey invitation has been successfully delivered to the recipient.

Read

If the survey invitation email has been opened, it will be considered read. This is great if you want to do a follow-up and can use Power Automate to check for survey invitations that have been Read, and send them a reminder email to take the survey.

Started

If the respondent clicks on the link to the survey and starts it, it will update their status. Perhaps they ran out of time and mean to go back to it. So, as above with the Read status, you might want to do a follow up with them at a later time and remind them to take the survey.

Responded

Finally, this is what we want. The recipient of the email has completed the survey by clicking on the invitation link.