Contact Frequency Rules Overview

Note: Contact Frequency Rules are only applied to survey activity associated with contacts currently linked to the survey’s contact database. This means that only past invitations or survey activity for contacts that exist in the current database are checked. Activity tied to contacts not linked at the time of invite evaluation will not be considered.

If your contacts feel that they are being inundated with an endless shower of survey invitations, they will rapidly lose interest and stop answering, and it may hurt the overall relationship with the contact. Contact frequency rules allow you to control how often your contacts receive survey invitations. You can set up global rules and rules for individual surveys or groups of surveys to block survey invitations if they have previously received an invitation within a specified number of days.

Contact Frequency Rules apply to email invitations sent through the Forsta Plus batch emailing functionality, and can also be used from Digital Feedback to block invites.

Contact Frequency Rules only apply to surveys that have been added to the hub and are linked to the contact database. The Rules do not apply to reminder emails if the original invitation was not stopped by the contact frequency rules.

You can set up three types of rules:

1. Global rules that apply across all surveys (Applying a Global Rule).

2. Survey-specific rules that apply only to specific surveys (Adding a Survey-Specific Rule).

3. You can also create groups of surveys with specific delays (Creating a Group).

How Contact Frequency Rules Work

When a survey is linked to a contact database for which Contact Frequency Rules are set up, the rules will automatically apply to any emailing done on that survey. In addition, in Digital Feedback you can check the contact frequency rules before launching an invite. If contact rules are applied, checking will be done to see if the contact has a previous survey activity where number of days since the last “InivitationDate”, or "StartDate" if "InvitationDate" is empty, is more than or equal to the “Days between survey invitations” setting in the Contact Frequency Rules.

When Contact Frequency Rules are evaluated in emailing, and the time elapsed since last invite is less than the “Days between survey invitations” setting, the system will set a system variable FilterStatus to 1, a FilterStatusDate to current time, and FilteredBySurveyId to the survey id of the survey for which there was a previous respondent record with emailing. Emailing will then be blocked for this particular respondent record, and as long as FilterStatus is 1 there will be no further attempt to email this particular respondent record. However the same contact may be uploaded again to the survey as a new respondent record at a later date, and if enough days have passed it will pass the contact frequency check.

If the time elapsed since an email was last sent to that contact is more than the specified time, the system will set FilterStatus to 0, and then any emailing on this particular respondent record will be allowed without further checking against contact frequency rules. This means that you will for example be allowed to send a reminder email to that particular respondent record, regardless of how many days have elapsed since the original invitation was sent to that particular respondent record. If you upload the same contact again to the survey as a new respondent record later, the system will run contact frequency checks on the new record.

In Digital Feedback the contact frequency rule checking will be done before launching an invite, so that will not be tracked in the respondent data. Examples of how contact frequency rule checking is done in Digital Feedback are provided in the Digital Feedback user manual.