Notifications are a powerful tool to nudge participant enrollment and engagement, but should be considered thoughtfully to avoid overburdening the participant.
Best Practices
The following are general guidelines for participant notifications:
- Always keep the participant experience in mind! Often fewer notifications are better to prevent alert fatigue.
- Use notifications to inform or drive action. When action is required (e.g., survey tasks), use links to direct the participant to complete the action.
- If the participant is expected to use the mobile app, consider using push notifications that can take the participant directly to a survey or tab within the app.
- Make it clear who the notification is coming from:
- For SMS, include the study name at the beginning of the text so participants can identify who is sending the message.
- For email, make sure you've added a "From Name" and "Reply To Email Address" on your About Settings tab.
- For push, keep it short! Push messages should be concise, so that the entire message fits on the screen. Generally 1–2 sentences work best. Be sure to include your workspace's logo as well!
- Escalate overdue surveys or important information to coordinators with coordinator notifications.
Examples
Depending on the scope of your project, you may consider incorporating notifications for the following:
- Invitation: Invite participants to join the project, typically by including a survey link, and include follow up notifications for those who haven't responded
- Consent: Send participants a signed copy of their consent form
- Survey tasks: Alert participants when new surveys are available and when surveys remain incomplete after a certain number of days
- Device adherence: Nudge participants to connect or sync their device
- EHR connection: Remind participants to connect their EHR
Project Invitations
These are typically in the form of an email, and use either the Call to Action V2 or Project Invitation templates. Both of these templates contain a button that can link either to a web survey or account registration.
The Project Invitation template will dynamically pull in information about your project and organization (name, description, logo), while the Call to Action V2 template allows you more customization regarding the content and formatting of your email.
From the template, you can update the banner image, copy and paste your approved participant communications into the Body of the email, and link directly to your screening and/or consent survey (Note: the survey must be published to your project to select it). You can also define a follow up action, such as account registration. More information on sending the invitation can be found in Enrollment by Invitation.
We also advise sending follow up invitation nudges for those who do not enroll, which can be in the form of email or SMS. First, create a segment to look for participants who do not have a survey response for the survey linked in the invitation:
From there, you can create a schedule to send a follow up to these participant 2 days after entering the segment, and again 3 days after that, if they've still not consented:
Copy of Signed Consent
A signed copy of consent can be attached to an email in a few steps:
- Create the email notification. We recommend using the Informational V2 template and customizing the content from there.
- The signed consent cannot be attached within the notification, but is actually configured within the consent survey step. Within the consent step properties, there's a field titled "Consent PDF Email Notification". Select the notification you created, and then save and publish your survey.
Survey Tasks & Reminders
When sending survey tasks to participants, we recommend also sending a notification that alerts them of their new tasks. For example, if you have a weekly survey that is delivered every Monday, you could also include a push notification in that same schedule.
Further, the push notification can be configured so that clicking on it will open up the survey in MyDataHelps:
To increase survey compliance, you can also nudge participants to complete survey tasks days later if they remain incomplete. The following schedule will deliver a notification 1 day and 3 days after the Fall survey was delivered, if the Fall survey task is still incomplete:
Device Reminders
If your project collects device (sensor) data from participants, you may want to nudge them to either connect a device or sync their device. The Sensor Data Received criteria type allows you to evaluate for specific sensor types and last sync date.
To nudge participants who have enrolled but not yet begun sharing their Fitbit or Apple data, create a schedule that evaluates the following:
You can also nudge participants who haven't shared (or presumably synced) data in the last couple of days by filtering for last sync date:
EHR Connection Reminders
Similar to the previous section, you can nudge participants to connect (or reconnect) their EHR. This can be done using the Linked Account criteria type. The schedule below will notify participants 1 day after enrollment if they have not connected an EHR account:
Additionally, you may want to track participants whose EHR connections need to be reconnected using a segment. This can be done with the following logic:
To nudge them, create an On Entering Segment schedule that nudges a participant to reconnect their provider once they meet the criteria above.