By default, someone who finishes your survey stays on the PublicInput page and sees your confirmation message. You can instead send them on to a page you choose, on your own website or anywhere else.

Feedback is rarely the reason someone was online in the first place. They were doing something else, and you interrupted them to ask. The redirect puts them back where they were.

Take a parks and recreation team running registration through recreation management software. A season of youth soccer wraps up, and the confirmation email that goes out to families includes a short feedback survey about the program.

A parent clicks through from the recreation software into the survey, answers three questions about coaching, scheduling and facilities, and submits. Without a redirect they land on a PublicInput confirmation page and the trail ends there. With one, they land back in their account in the recreation software, on the page listing programs open for registration.

The parent has just told you what they thought of the last session, and is now looking at the next one. That is a better ending for them and a better one for the department.

The same shape works anywhere feedback is attached to a transaction someone was already in the middle of:

Returning people to your own site. If the survey was reached from a project page on your city or agency website, sending people back there keeps them in your own content rather than leaving them on a dead end.

Pointing people at the obvious next step. A rate-review survey can end on the page explaining the hearing schedule. A budget survey can end on the page listing upcoming public meetings.

Working with a research panel. If a polling or panel firm is recruiting respondents for you, they will give you a completion URL. Sending respondents back to it is how the panel knows the person finished and should be credited. This is a standard requirement for panel work.

The redirect is set per project.

Immediately sends people to your page as soon as they submit. They do not see the PublicInput confirmation. Use this when the page you are sending them to does its own thank-you, which is usually the case when you are handing back to another system.

After showing the confirmation shows your confirmation message first, waits the number of seconds you set, then moves them on. Participants get a control to continue straight away or to stay on the page. Use this when your confirmation message says something the participant needs to read, such as what happens next or who to contact.

You can include merge fields in the redirect URL. They are replaced with the real values at the moment the person submits, and are encoded for you so you do not have to worry about spaces or punctuation.

The built-in fields are:

Any custom participant attributes you have set up also appear in the list, as {{attr-...}} fields. If you store an account number or a household reference as a participant attribute, that is how you pass it on. The list in your own account shows your own attribute names. See Participant Information for setting those up.

So a redirect back into recreation software might look like this:

https://register.example.gov/my-account/programs?ref={{user-id}}

And a panel completion URL like this:

https://panel.example.com/complete?rid={{user-id}}

Passing an identifier matters when the receiving system needs to know who arrived. A recreation platform that gets {{user-id}} can drop the parent straight into their own account rather than a login screen.

The URL must start with https. Plain http is rejected. Response details can travel in this link, so it is not sent in the clear. If you paste an address that is not valid, you are told when you save rather than finding out later that the redirect never fired.

Think about what you put in the link. Merge fields can carry a respondent's email address and IP address to another system. Only include what the receiving system genuinely needs, and only send it somewhere you would be comfortable defending in a public records request. This matters more, not less, when the receiving system belongs to another department or an outside vendor.

The redirect waits for follow-up questions. If your survey collects demographics or Title VI follow-up questions after submit, participants are not redirected while that is still open. Those responses are a civil rights reporting record and are not skipped.

Staff data-entry sessions are excluded. If your team is entering responses on someone's behalf, they stay on the page instead of being bounced out to the redirect after every entry.

Post-submission redirects are available on the Engage Plus plan family. If the option is not visible in your submit settings, contact your account manager.