Scheduling Playbook

Schedules allow you to automatically deliver content (i.e., surveys and notifications) to participants, close incomplete participant surveys, and update custom fields for participants. Before starting to configure the schedules for your project, it is helpful to review the following questions and examples to determine the types of schedules, additional settings, and actions that are necessary for your project. 

Scheduling Questions for Consideration

1. At what point in time will surveys be delivered?  
   • • Is it relative to enrollment, a date-based custom field, or a previous survey response?
        
2. When should notifications be sent relative to when the surveys are sent? 
   • • What is the acceptable timeframe for completion of the survey? Should the survey be closed (i.e., participants can no longer access it) after this timeframe?
     • What frequency of notifications is effective and respectful?
     • If sending survey reminder notifications, how long ago was the survey delivered?
        
3. What type of notifications do you want to send (push, SMS, email)?
   • • How is the participant interacting with the study? Are they using the MyDataHelps App or Web?
     • At the time of notification delivery, are you guaranteed to have the participants’ email? Phone number?
        
4. Will the project require randomization or A/B testing?

By default, on registration, participants are only required to specify either phone or email.

Schedule Examples

Overdue Survey, Send Reminder

In this scenario, we will create a schedule that sends a reminder notification to all participants who have completed the “Baseline” survey more than 3 days ago and have not yet completed the “Week 1” survey. We will assume that the “Baseline” survey is sent on enrollment.

To begin, we will create a schedule Based on Participant Events, where the event is set to Enrollment. We will set the trigger logic to run 1 day after Enrollment and repeat every 1 day so that all applicable participants will receive this notification.

If you set the trigger logic to run 0 days after Enrollment and the participant enrolls after the scheduled Time of Day, the schedule will not trigger and no actions will be taken!

Next, you will need to use the "Filter Participants" section to identify participants that have completed the "Baseline" survey more than 3 days ago and have not yet completed the "Week 1" survey.

Finally, configure the Actions section to send the "SurveyReminder" push notification and click Save.

Repeatable/Persistent Survey

In some scenarios, you may wish to have a survey that can always be completed, even after one was just submitted. For example, perhaps you have a symptom or meal survey that once submitted, should immediately be available to be completed again (perhaps you cannot know when the participant will next have a symptom or meal). In these situations, you can create a schedule that will ensure a survey is always available for submission.

To set up the schedule, you'll want trigger criteria such that any time there is not an incomplete (available) instance of the survey, the system will deliver a new one. Below is a screenshot outlining how a meal survey will be delivered any time there is not an available, incomplete survey.