Demand API Overview

This page provides an overview of Demand API capabilities, integration steps, and other helpful details for business stakeholders and developers.

---

​

1. What is Research Desk?

Reliable, Repeatable Data Collection Research Desk is an industry-leading quantitative research sample platform that empowers researchers to collect high-quality data at a fair price. The platform brings together everything a research team needs from a sample sourcing standpoint — respondent targeting, fraud prevention, fieldwork management, and reconciliation — in one streamlined interface. Research Desk Value

• Automate sourcing of sample data
• Mitigate fraud across all sources for consistent data quality
• Simplify project reconciliation and billing details
• Save time, resources, and frustration with an easy to use platform.

Connectivity Research Desk supports nearly all commercially available survey platforms. This means your existing survey infrastructure can connect directly with Research Desk without any disruption to your current tools.

---

​

2. What is the Demand API?

The Research Desk Demand API lets your technology platforms interact directly with Research Desk — programmatically creating projects, configuring surveys, managing respondent targeting, and tracking responses — without any manual work inside the Research Desk interface. This is most valuable for organizations that want to:

• Automate survey creation and management at scale
• Integrate Research Desk into their own internal platforms or tools
• Sync project data with their own systems in real time
• Reduce manual data entry and minimize the risk of human error

The API is a RESTful service, which means it follows widely adopted conventions that make it straightforward for any modern engineering team to work with. It uses standard HTTP methods and returns JSON-formatted data.

---

​

3. Core Concepts: How Research Desk is Structured

Before integrating, it helps to understand how Research Desk structures work. There are three primary objects: Think of it this way: a Project is like a folder, Surveys are the individual studies inside that folder, and Responses are the records generated as respondents flow through each study.

---

​

4. High-Level Integration Flow

A typical Demand API integration follows this lifecycle. Your development team will implement each step, while your research team configures the business logic (targeting criteria, quotas, pricing).

​

Step 1 — Authenticate

Your system requests an API token using your Research Desk credentials. This token is included in all subsequent API calls to verify your identity and account permissions. Go to: Authentication Workflow

​

Step 2 — Map Attributes & Qualifications

Before launching surveys, you retrieve Research Desk’s standard list of qualification attributes (demographics, behaviors, etc.) and map them to the targeting criteria your platform uses. This is a one-time setup step. Go to: Mapping Attributes

​

Step 3 — Create a Project

When a new research initiative begins, your system creates a Project via the API. This establishes the high-level container that all related surveys will live under. Go to: Creating Projects

​

Step 4 — Create & Configure Surveys

Within the project, your system creates one or more surveys. Each survey defines the target audience (qualifications and quotas), sample size, estimated LOI, incidence rate, and the survey URL. Go to: Creating Surveys

​

Step 5 — Manage Survey Status & Performance

During fieldwork, your system can update surveys in real time to manage performance or shifting requirements, for example: pausing, reactivating, or closing surveys as quotas fill or fieldwork requirements change; updating pricing to drive more traffic to the survey; creating a new survey where needed to augment the speed of data collection for specific groups. Go to: Managing Surveys

​

Step 6 — Managing Respondents

As respondents flow through the survey, your system can retrieve response records via the API to monitor progress, verify completes, and manage reconciliation. Go to: Managing Respondents

​

Step 7 — Closing the Project

In order to close out a project you will need to update the status of the Surveys in the project to “Complete.” If any responses are deemed to be of low quality, you can process (“reconcile”) those records via the Responses endpoint to ensure these records are removed from your final bill. Once processed, the Surveys API will reflect updated costs in a matter of minutes.

---

⚠️ Redirect Links — A Critical Integration Requirement Your survey platform must be configured with Research Desk’s redirect links at each endpoint of the survey (complete, terminate, over-quota, security fail). These redirect URLs pass respondents back to Research Desk with the correct status codes and the respondent’s unique ID (RDUD). Without these, Research Desk cannot track outcomes.

---

​

5. Environments

Research Desk provides two environments for integration work:

• Staging https://stage-demand.researchdesk.com) — Use this for all development and testing. It mirrors production behavior without real respondent traffic.
• Production https://demand.researchdesk.com) — Your live environment once integration testing is complete.

We strongly recommend completing full end-to-end testing in the staging environment before going live. This includes testing both complete and terminate survey paths in an incognito browser window to avoid triggering Research Defender’s security flags during QA.

---

​

6. What to Expect from the Integration Process

The Rep Data Team is available to work with your team through each phase of the integration. The recommended integration touchpoints are as follows:

1. Initial Consultation and Scoping — understanding your specific use-cases, goals, and platform architecture.
2. Access and Credentials — setting up your production and staging environments and issuing API credentials.
3. Technical implementation — your engineering team builds the integration using this guide and the full API reference documentation.
4. Testing and Validation — joint testing of the end-to-end flow in the staging environment.
5. Go-Live — migrating to production and monitoring initial traffic.
6. Monitoring & Iteration — ongoing optimization and support as your integration evolves.

Support: For integration questions or to get started, contact your Research Desk representative directly, or you can reach out to clientsuccess@repdata.com.

---

​

7. API Endpoint Overview

Below is a summary of the main endpoint groups available in the Demand API. Full documentation for each endpoint — including request/response schemas, parameters, and examples — are available in subsequent sections of this API documentation site.

---